chrysopoeia (12. 443)

Although the aims of alchemists of transforming base metals into gold has been previously achieved through synthetic transmutation first in 1941 by heavy bombardment of mercury with neutrons—though the resulting isotopes were extremely radioactive and again in 1980 by Glenn Seaborg at Lawrence Livermore labs by surgically removing protons and neutrons from bismuth atoms, these demonstration projects were prohibitively expensive and would need to be scaled up a trillion-fold in order to produce a microscopic speck of the precious metal. We learn, however—via tmn—that researchers working on the ALICE programme at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the acronym somewhat disappointingly only standing for A Large Ion Collider Experiment designed to study conditions immediately after the Big Bang with by creating exotic plasma phases of matter, have recently detected the mass albeit very short-lived conversion of lead into gold as the extremely hot and close-packed conditions cause dissociative reactions that can cause the target element to eject a small number of protons and neutrons, producing gold (the similar densities probably what inspired the study of alchemy in the first place). The above quick-silver and thallium were also temporary by-products of nuclear transmutation. Related to the title term, χρυσοποιία, ἀργυροποιία (argyropeia) refers to artificial silver-making, usually trying with copper.