With the help of the Large Hadron Collider, it was possible to extract gold from lead (3 photos)

Hooray, fellow alchemists, a centuries-old dream has come true, humanity has finally learned how to make gold from lead.





On the periodic table, lead and gold are separated by just a few spaces. Gold has 79 protons, and lead has 82, so you can essentially knock a few protons (plus a few neutrons) out of a lead atom and get a gold atom. It sounds like science fiction, but scientists have managed to implement this with the help of the Large Hadron Collider.



At the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, Switzerland, scientists have conducted a slew of experiments and have managed to momentarily recreate quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that existed just millionths of a second after the Big Bang.



As a result, three protons were knocked out of the lead nucleus, leaving gold in its place.

True, after three years of experiments, not even a gram of gold was collected, and in general it turned out that gold mining this way is long, expensive and inefficient, but that's not the point! The main thing for science is the result, not the quantity.

Although the dream of medieval alchemists was technically realized, their hopes for wealth were dashed again. It's a shame.