CERN boffins turn lead into gold for about a microsecond at unimaginable cost The dream of every medieval alchemist – turning lead into gold – has finally come true thanks to some impractical physics at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Physicists at the multibillion-euro atom smasher near Geneva managed to transmute lead into gold during high-speed ion collisions, proving that you can defy nature if you …
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Indeed. And what we are calling "God" today is in fact an extremely complex set of mathematical equations governing the laws of the universe which humanity will one day understand.
So basically being a religious Christian fanatic is the same as being "correct" in the future right? ;)
Difference one: Big Bang is a mathematical solution. Your examples are imaginary (and only monotheist examples on top).
Difference two: Scientists are constantly testing whether something better is around, and there are some other things around which might be a better solution with more data. You cannot test your gods.
Difference three: No real scientists will say that big bang, aka singularity, is the only possible beginning, it is simply which currently fits best. None of your monotheist religions have such an idea of questioning.
Difference four: As soon as we have a better explanation the big bang will be gone. Same as it happened which phlogiston, Ether, and will happen with Dark Matter and Dark Energy. The latter two are just placeholder names for the effects we observe - there were many names, but those two simply have the coolest sound.
I could go on and on, but I hope this is enough about the difference between science and religion.
To give it a nice ending: Religious scientists see religion as ethical construct to live together and a way to get peace of mind (most common today). Or see actual true science as a way to discover god (or the construct of god in the wider sense to understand the world): Look in the history, the time when the Arabian world was leading, when Rome was leading, when the Greek were leading, when Egypt was leading and so on. Many great religions had a time of embracing science to find god - though most lost their way when power hungry people took over.
Difference one: Big Bang is a mathematical solution
exactly, it's an intellectual solution : It is only a prolongation of a line of which Hubble has observed a local tangent, We happily extrapolate into the past more than 13 billion years, and somehow pretend that it all began at t=0 . In that, God (Yahve, Allah, Krishna, Zeus ...) is as good an explanation as a giant explosion
Difference two: Scientists are constantly testing whether something better is around, and there are some other things around which might be a better solution with more data. You cannot test your gods
nor can the scientist observe the BigBang. We can observe the remnants of the originel universe in the cosmiv microwave background that existed ... 380 000 years AFTER the BigBang. We have absolutely 0 (zero) proof of anything earlier as that, so very very very far away from the BigBang "singularity".
Difference three: No real scientists will say that that the big bang, aka singularity, is the only possible beginning, it is simply which currently fits best
you should study physics before saying such things. The current BigBang theory is in conflict with 2 scientific observations : where is anti-matter, and what is that "cosmic-inflation" thing ? Until you can explain those 2 fundamental pieces of the BigBang, that theory is simply false.
Yeah, we could BOTH go on and on! Have one on me!
Only Udo Lindenberg knows the truth: "Hinter dem Horizont geht's weiter", in English: "It continues beyond the horizon" or "It goes on beyond the horizon" or "You can go on beyond the horizon" etc..
@Zolko
People trying to understand how the universe came to exist* & advancing human knowledge (even if many mistakes and blind alleys on the way) is, in my opinion, better than just
unquestioningly accepting whatever some book purportedly says about a magic man in the sky *** doing it all.
Questioning / investigation is why we advance our knowledge.
If you want to go back to "holy books", in the bible shellfish & pork were "unclean" (for dubious religious reasons) - but real reason was (most likely) due to higher likelihood of illness from eating those foodstuffs and so banning eating them helped the health of that religions followers. **** These days we know huge amounts about huge numbers of types of food poisoning***** related to shellfish & pork... and importantly how to mitigate that risk, through many methods including food storage / preparation / cooking methods ( e.g. cold storage a huge impact on reducing food poisoning, ) , time of year / water conditions when the food is harvested (e.g. responsible oyster harvesters avoid times of year when "red tide" i.e. high incidence of organisms likely to cause paralytic shellfish poisoning )
* even if our knowledge is currently very limited and our current theories will doubtless in years to come** cause the same sort of wry smile as those estimates of the age of the earth at being a few thousand years old
** assuming we do not succumb to natural / man made issues that screw up scientific advances.
*** plenty of religions out there, not sure why you chose phallocentric, monotheistic ones only
**** religion may be heavily about coercive control, but some of that may actually have been for the well being of the followers (though cynics may say that avoiding needless deaths just serves to keep the numbers up & grow the religion faster!)
***** using generic terminology of "food poisoning" as consuming something & then at some later point ill due to it - e.g. various parasitic worms a common cause of illness quite a while after eating pork but technically not "food poisoning" per se.
Not at all. Most atheists and scientists believe that there are extremely complex sets of mathematical equations governing the laws of the universe that we don't understand.
That's the whole point of science.
Religious fanatics believe it's some conscious being that looks like an old white man with a beard who will sometimes answer their prayers to make their team win the playoffs one time, yet ignores the prayers of people in disastrous conditions or mortal danger.
Sure, at the moment they fill a gap in our understanding of why the universe appears as it does, but that's what implies their existence. The classic example being that the gravitational force attributable to visible matter in most spiral galaxies is insufficient to explain their rotation, so there must also be matter in there that we can't see, hence the assumption of the existence of "dark matter". Likewise for dark energy. They're both acknowledgements that our models of the universe are incomplete.
I don't think the idea of dark matter and dark energy are equivalent to "luminiferous ether" or "phlogiston", because those were hypotheses attempting to explain various natural phenomena that weren't understood at the time. The explanations turned out to be wrong and they were discarded once the experimental evidence indicated such. The effects of dark matter and dark energy are very much visible, we just don't yet know what they are.
The effects of dark matter and dark energy are very much visible
no : dark matter and dark energy have been "invented " because our observations didn't fit our models. Dark matter was called upon because 2 observations didn't match (visible stars in- and rotation of- galaxies), and dark energy was called upon because it fitted well with Einsteins equations of general relativity and a "measured " flat universe. There is so much ad-hoc theories created ex-nihilo in these 2 concepts that no, we don't see any of their effects : there is nothing "dark " in the dark energy, it's only that our models don't fit our observations. This is as scientific as claiming that Zeus on Mount Olympus is creating lightnings and thunder because we don't understand static electricity.
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Phlogiston as a theory had something to commend it, in that it was repeatable and explained a broad set of phenomena. Interpreted rather narrowly as "the absence of oxygen" it's not factually wrong. It's just better theories supported by a wider set of experiments replaced it.
Bismuth to gold was already done in 1980, and bismuth was chosen because it is already closer to gold and the smaller quantity of gold produced by lead for the same budget might have been too difficult to detect/measure .
Using the LBNL’s Bevalac particle accelerator, Morrissey and his colleagues boosted beams of carbon and neon nuclei nearly to light speed and then slammed them into foils of bismuth. When a high-speed nucleus in the beam collided with a bismuth atom, it sheared off part of the bismuth nucleus, leaving a slightly diminished atom behind. By sifting through the particulate wreckage, the team found a number of transmuted atoms in which four protons had been removed from a bismuth atom to produce gold. Along with the four protons, the collision-induced reactions had removed anywhere from six to 15 neutrons, producing a range of gold isotopes from gold 190 (79 protons and 111 neutrons) to gold 199 (79 protons, 120 neutrons), the researchers reported in the March 1981 issue of Physical Review C.
The amount of gold produced was so small that Morrissey and his colleagues had to identify it by measuring the radiation given off by unstable gold nuclei as they decayed over the course of a year. In addition to the several radioactive isotopes of gold, the particle collisions presumably produced some amount of the stable isotope gold 197—the stuff of wedding bands and gold bullion—but because it does not decay the researchers were unable to confirm its presence. “The stable isotope would have to be observed in a mass spectrometer,” Morrissey says, “but I think that the number of atoms was, and is still, below the level of detection by mass spec.”
Isolating the minute quantities of gold would be even more difficult using lead as a starting material, but smashing high-speed nuclei into a lead target would indeed complete the long-sought transmutation. Some of the collisions would be expected to remove three protons from lead, or one proton from mercury, to produce gold. “It is relatively straightforward to convert lead, bismuth or mercury into gold,” Morrissey says. “The problem is the rate of production is very, very small and the energy, money, etcetera expended will always far exceed the output of gold atoms.”
In 1980, when the bismuth-to-gold experiment was carried out, running particle beams through the Bevalac cost about $5,000 an hour, “and we probably used about a day of beam time,” recalls Oregon State University nuclear chemist Walter Loveland, one of the researchers on the project. Glenn Seaborg, who shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with heavy elements and who died in 1999, was the senior author on the resulting study. “It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment," Seaborg told the Associated Press that year. The going rate for an ounce of gold at the time? About $560."
"Fact or Fiction?: Lead Can Be Turned into Gold", Scientific American, Jan 31, 2014
Farts weigh the same in a vacuum as in an atmosphere. However, in a vacuum, the molecules and therefore the smell will dissipate faster...
Do they? (Ideal) gas molecules don't interact much and move freely (difuse) in the relatively large space between molecules.
I vaguely recall from high school chemistry (+50 years ago) this was why you could add partial pressures.
In practice I suppose it depends on the dynamic of how the gas is "introduced" into the environment. A slow squeaky "leak" v. a ground shaking trouser howitzer.
CERN has quite a number of chips. One single gold bonding wire in any of those chips (erm the chip in their packaging case) is more. The CPUs are connected to mainboards, both sides have gold layer on their contact. Probably each of those contacts is more. And to add on top: Does not decay faster than any human can comprehend.
This is indeed more a funny unexpected byproduct :D.
Not really unexpected. Particle physicists producing atom-scale levels of radioactive gold is exactly what they expected from doing this, and similar experiments with bismuth streams in earlier colliders.
Based on the quantities involved, it would be cheaper to buy a gold mine than to produce it via current methods of particle collision.
Technically 197Au is the only stable isotope, due to things like 'magic numbers' and its hue is due to the outer electrons approaching light speed thus causing the colour to shift.
Copper is also the same as is (I believe) bromine.
Interestingly the r-process isn't the only method, neutron star jets caused by enormous stars collapsing may account for some implying the existence of elements much heavier than Uranium and in actual fact these primordial super-heavy elements may yet be out there in space.
I've looked into the physics here and some of the caculations can actually be done on a consumer level GPU as have a Tesla K80.
These days one could do the same calculatons on a 30xx series for much lower electricity cost.
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