Well, we’ve come full circle it seems: science has become alchemy again. The dream of mediaeval alchemists has at last been realised: scientists have finally transmuted base metal to gold. Instead of the Philosopher’s Stone, though, they used the Scientist’s Collider.
For over a thousand years, alchemists dreamed of turning lead into gold – a transformation long dismissed as myth or metaphor. But now, in a jaw-dropping twist, scientists at CERN have made that ancient vision real. Using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the world’s most powerful particle accelerator – they’ve triggered a subatomic transmutation that turns lead into actual gold atoms.
The transmutation of a base metal (not necessarily lead, though lead was most often used as the exemplar) wasn’t “dismissed” as a metaphor – it was one. The goal of alchemy was in fact a spiritual transmutation. ‘Base metals’ like lead were seen as analogous to the unrefined human spirit, while gold was, in Victor Hugo’s words, “not a metal, gold is light”. Hugo wrote at a time when the modern idea of ‘elements’ was only just beginning. The old idea of ‘earth, wind, air and water’ still held for many people. Such as the Gnostic mystic Zosimos of Panopolis, who wrote, “As the sun is, so to speak, a flower of the fire and (simultaneously) the heavenly sun, the right eye of the world, so copper when it blooms – that is when it takes the color of gold, through purification – becomes a terrestrial sun, which is king of the earth, as the sun is king of heaven.”
As science learned more about atomic structure, though, it became clear that all elements, from hydrogen, to lead, gold, and uranium, are combinations of fundamental particles. Protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks and so on. So, logically, it had to be possible to recombine those particles somehow and transmute one element to another. Which is indeed the process that fuels atomic fission and fusion.
The only thing is, it’s fiendishly difficult.
The transformation occurred during the ALICE experiment, one of four major research projects at the LHC, located 100 meters underground along the Franco-Swiss border. In these experiments, lead nuclei are accelerated to near-light speeds and slammed into each other inside the collider’s 27-kilometer tunnel.
Each lead atom contains 82 protons.
During high-energy interactions, it occasionally sheds three protons, becoming an atom of gold, which has 79 protons.
These events are detected by highly sensitive instruments like the Zero Degree Calorimeter (ZDC).
In fact, each cycle of the experiment generated about 86 billion gold atoms. Eighty-six billion! We’re rich!
Except…
The actual mass of gold produced amounts to just 29 picograms – that’s 0.000000000029 grams. You’d need a microscope just to imagine it.
Not only that, the gold atoms produced are highly energetic and therefore highly unstable. Within microseconds they either decay into other elements, or smash into the collider walls and disintegrate.
Let’s address the obvious question:
Could we someday use this to manufacture gold?
Unlikely. The process is wildly energy-intensive and produces microscopic yields. Each atom exists only for fractions of a second before vanishing into detector walls or breaking down in other interactions. Even if we stabilized the atoms, the cost would dwarf the value of the gold itself.
Still, the most advanced science meeting the dreams of mediaeval gnostic mysticism has its own kind of magic.
