ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider

medieval alchemists rn

Literal fucking alchemists. That’s why they built the $20 billion machine.

And people make fun of me for being an alchemist. My science shed may not be as big as the LHC or FermiLab but I have over seven buckets and 2 balloons and there’s over 100 elements. It’s only a matter of time. (I know what matter and time are. I’m not being irresponsible.)

Jokes aside, that's actually beyond amazing for the future. They're documenting photon to photon and photon to nucleus interaction from near-misses, that can eject a small number of neutrons and protons. And they create gold from lead on lead nucleus near misses for a split second.

Although I can already see the pop-science headlines about how they've discovered "Matter conversion" and they'll be "printing gold". And then buried at the bottom of the article there's some line about how it would take two centuries or so to reach that point.

WE DID IT!!!!!