CERN physicists turn lead into gold (sort of)

The alchemists of the ancient world were convinced that it was possible to turn ordinary lead into more valuable gold, based on similarities in their characteristics.

Those beliefs were borne out by later discoveries that the 2 elements have very similar properties in terms of their atomic structure: for example, lead (Pb) has 82 protons while gold (Au) has 79.

Despite that, turning one into another has remained impossible - until now. The physicists of the ALICE (or A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector at CERN now claim to have observed the phenomenon in action.

It occurred as a result of the ALICE group's own goal, which is to slam heavy ions of lead into each other in order to study the resulting quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter created as a result of the experiment's eponymous collisions.

Those "extremely high-energy" (which can involve trillions of electron-volts, or teraelectron-volts (TeV)) events are apparently capable of knocking the protons off the ions' nuclei in order to turn them into those of other elements - some of which just happen to be gold.

The ALICE group reports that their protocols might have resulted in the appearance of about 86 billion gold nuclei at a time...which equates to about 2.9 ×10^-11 grams (g) of the metal.

In addition, the gold exists "for just a tiny fraction of a second" post-collision.

Accordingly, while the transmutation of lead into gold (or chrysopoeia) might finally have been achieved, it might not quite live up to the dreams of proto-scientists over millennia.