Scientists Accidentally Turned Lead Into Gold

They achieved the "dream of medieval alchemists." Goldfinger The mad geniuses over at CERN have accomplished what alchemists of yore never could: they turned lead into gold. As detailed in a paper published last week in the journal Physical Review C, researchers working with the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) atom-annihilating Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accidentally transformed humble lead into temporary gold nuclei. The researchers are part of CERN's A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) project, which, put simply, involves scientists smashing atomic particles together at close to the speed of light in an attempt to replicate the conditions that followed the Big Bang. The discovery, they say, is an incidental outcome of their experimentation with collisions between lead nuclei, which contain three more protons than gold. Sometimes, as the paper explains, rather than hit each other directly, the ions graze past each other. And when that happens, the combin ... Read full article.