Hi I'm a chemist, my current work is with PFAS compounds, often known as forever chemicals. Please ask me about those, or anything else you are curious about related to chemistry. I will try to give you a solid response.
Hi I'm a chemist, my current work is with PFAS compounds, often known as forever chemicals. Please ask me about those, or anything else you are curious about related to chemistry. I will try to give you a solid response.
Have you guys cracked the 'turning lead into gold' formula yet?
That's been figured out for a while now, stars turn metals into other metals all the time. Knock three protons off a lead nucleus and there you go. We've done similar stuff on Earth. There was an experiment in 1980 that transmuted bismuth into gold, atomic number 83 down to 79. Several issues. It takes a particle accelerator to do it and it's prohibitively expensive, like far more expensive than the value of any gold produced. Other problem is most stable gold on earth is the isotope gold 197, and slamming alpha particles and radioactive neon into chunks of metal is kind of a brute force approach, so most of the gold they got was radioactive.
In fact, the researchers in that experiment only knew they had gold because they measured radioactive decay for a year, because the amounts were so small they couldn't be weighed or seen visually.
Yeah, it's just that it costs like 8 times more than the gold is worth.