CERN researchers create gold from lead in breakthrough nuclear experiment

Through the looking glass: The alchemists' dream, it turns out, was not misguided – just premature. While the gold created by CERN researchers can't fill vaults, it has unlocked deeper insights into the universe's fundamental forces. For centuries, the transformation of lead into gold was the ultimate goal for alchemists, a dream fueled by the similar densities of the two metals and gold's enduring allure. While chemistry eventually revealed that lead and gold are fundamentally different elements, making such a transformation impossible by chemical means, modern nuclear physics has now realized this ancient ambition, if only for a fleeting moment and in vanishingly small quantities. Researchers at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have reported the first systematic experimental detection and measurement of lead transmuting into gold. The findings, published by the ALICE collaboration in Physical Review Journals, detail how high-energy physics has achieved what was once the stuff of ... Read full article.