Well, except for in particle accelerators, stars, and supernovae, atoms are never created or destroyed, so if they're creating gold, it's here for good.
Except that everyone with a fusor can feed the gold atom a neutron which converts it to unstable Au-198 that decays to mercury. Fun times when you can (theoretically) transmute gold to mercury with stuff you can order on the internet.
I definitely will mis-speak/mis-write, but my mathematic (also flawed) tells me that if Gold + 1 = Mercury, then Something + 1 = Gold, so we can find that "something" add 1 of the thingie, and booya!! gold!! (right?) (please read the above with silly humor)
In a slightly more serious note, I remember listening to Elon in some podcast 1-2 years ago saying how they create new metals/alloys that nobody had created previously, because they needed specific needs covered, and no known material had the attributes they needed. So.. in a way..
The whole concept of "turning lead into gold" is somewhat self defeating. Because turning lead into gold doesn't make lead as valuable as gold, it makes gold as valuable as lead.
This has happened before. Aliminium used to be very scarce, and hence expensive. More expensive than silver. The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.
A new process was invented to extract aluminum. So scarcity disappeared and value is negligible. Today we use it for packaging soda.
Turning anything (cheap) into gold means gold is cheap. It doesn't make us all rich.
> The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.
Interesting. I was curious how large and expensive this was.
Apparently the tip weighed only 100 ounce, at a time the price was around $1.10 per ounce. Translating to 2025 dollars it would be around $36 per ounce, or $3,600 for the entire tip; much less than I expected, but still more expensive than the silver price today ($32.75 per ounce).
In a way yes, but(!!) if I know the way and I turn 50gr of lead to gold per month, and I slowly do this (not convert 200 tons of lead into gold and flood the market) then I can have a rich and easy life without destabilising the price of gold. But that's just me.. Someone else may play this differently.
I presume you're referring to the concept of alchemy in the middle ages?
The problem in that context is test it would have been impossible to keep the process a secret. To be useful (to say the king) it would have to be more than one guy in a castle. And between spies, and traitors who could be materially incentivised), and outright kidnapping and torture, well, I just don't see it staying hidden.
And its not like a King could really even hide the fact that he had a "gold mine" producing endless quantities of gold.
It's kinda like the story of the goose laying the golden eggs. The story fails to elaborate on what they did with the eggs. Presumably they sold them, but to whom? And did that person not get curious as to the source of the gold? And what did he do with all that gold? He'd need to sell enough of it to pay the peasant. Did his customer not notice the increase in volume?
So no, alchemy wouldn't have remained a secret for long. And the king would just be financing wars to protect it.
The same mechanism that lets you convert gold-197 to mercury does in fact work to convert the equivalent isotope (that is, 1u lighter than gold) of the element left of gold on the periodic table to gold.
The only problem, the element left of gold is platinum, and platinum-196 is not even the most common isotope of platinum, making up ~25% of it. You're rather unlikely to be able to make money on this.
(Not that you would have been able to regardless of the price of platinum. There are 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a gram of gold, and a desktop fusor is going to generate ~<1m neutrons per second.)
Just saw this idea recently -- to add to your list: "Magnetars’ strong flares forge gold and other heavy elements"
https://earthsky.org/space/strong-flares-magnetars-forge-hea... "After black holes, neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe. A neutron star forms when the core of a massive star collapses during a supernova explosion. Intense gravitational forces compress the core, reducing most of its elements to subatomic particles called neutrons. And magnetars are neutron stars with intense magnetic fields. On April 29, 2025, astronomers said a powerful flare unleashed by a magnetar, named SGR 1806–20, created large amounts of heavy elements including gold, strontium, uranium and platinum. They think magnetar flares could produce as much as 10% of the heavy elements in our galaxy."
I have no clue about this stuff, but don't black holes also change matter... somehow? I mean, with all that gravity and stuff, crazy things must happen in there, right?
What happens inside a black hole is basically unknowable. We can only ponder the math which leads to ideas like space and time swapping roles once you cross the event horizon.[0] The only thing that comes out is hawking radiation, which is sort of like... half of nothing.
> space and time swapping roles once you cross the event horizon
This is a common misunderstanding. Space and time don't swap roles. It's just that there's one rather popular coordinate system (Schwarzschild coordinates) whose coordinates t, x outside the horizon correspond to temporal (timelike) and spatial (spacelike) directions, respectively, and inside they correspond to spacelike and timelike directions. What we mean by "timelike" and "spacelike", however, does not change.
As I understand contemporary physics, once matter crosses the event horizon it becomes part of the singularity. The singularity behaves as a single super-sized particle, so nothing happens inside. However I also have heard that many physicists don't believe that singularities actually exist, it's just the best mathematical model we have for physics that are too extreme for us to measure.
It does not become part of the singularity once it crosses the event horizon. The event horizon is actually rather uneventful as far as any particular piece of matter crossing it goes - it only means that this matter can never leave the boundary defined by the horizon, but it doesn't change it otherwise. The singularity (if it even exists) is the thing at the center of the black hole, far below its event horizon.
Technically yes. But also, things that enter the event horizon are compelled to hit the singularity on a very tight timescale. I forget the exact fraction of a second, but even for a supermassive hole it's very small. So it's not crazy to think of stuff entering the event horizon as immediately becoming part of the singularity (if it exists, as you mentioned. My bet is that it doesn't, but as far as our current understanding goes...)
The precise formula, assuming that object was at rest at the event horizon, is:
τ = (2√2)·R/3c
So "fraction of a second" is only true if you're talking about relatively small black holes. For a supermassive one, it can take hours or even days for the largest ones.
But note again that this assumes no orbit, just falling straight towards it from rest. For orbiting objects it could take much longer depending on their velocity.
Also, this all is from the perspective of the observer who is undergoing the fall. From the outside, time dilation means that objects never actually cross the event horizon at all - no matter how long you wait, you'll see them as they were getting closer and closer to it, but never the actual crossing.
>> it's just the best mathematical model we have for physics that are too extreme for us to measure
It's not only a measurement problem. Rather, the laws of physics, as we currently understand them, lead to this singularity. Sure, many physicists may doubt the existence of the singularity. They will need new physics, not only better equipment, to challenge it.
