We’ve all heard the old idea of turning lead into gold. For centuries, people actually believed it was possible. While those attempts didn’t work out, today’s scientists have been able to pull it off.
CERN, one of the biggest science labs in the world, is located on the border of Switzerland and France. It’s famous for the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), which is a 27 km long underground tunnel where particles are sped up to near light speed and then smashed together. If you’ve seen Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, there’s a collider in that movie that opens portals to other dimensions. CERN’s collider doesn’t do that, but it’s still one of the most powerful machines on Earth.
Lead has 82 protons, and gold has 79. That means to turn lead into gold, you’d have to somehow remove 3 protons from each lead atom. This needs a nuclear reaction, which only happens under extreme conditions and high energy.
CERN isn’t trying to make gold, but their experiments show how changing one element into another is scientifically possible. In fact, scientists at another lab once used a particle accelerator to fire high-energy particles at bismuth (a metal similar to lead). As a result, they actually created gold atoms — for a few milliseconds.
The result? The gold didn’t last. It was unstable and quickly changed into something else. Plus, the whole process cost way more than the gold was worth.
So yeah, it’s possible to turn matter into gold. But it’s super expensive, extremely hard to do, and the gold disappears almost instantly. You won’t get rich from it, but it’s still pretty amazing that science could do what people only dreamed about hundreds of years ago.
In the end, it proves our scientific advancements which may bring gold from lead in future.