This question of mine actually goes back to high school. Before then, I didn’t know much about nuclear physics. But as you all know, an atom is basically a set number of protons, with neutrons in the nucleus, and the same amount of electrons orbiting it.
My question(s): (1) Is it possible to artificially manufacture gold today (economically, I know there is probably some way to do it that is time-consuming and costly)? And, (2) if not, Will there be a method probably some day?
I know the element Technetium is not found naturally. It is produced by bombarding another element with deutron(?) radiation. Could you produce gold in a simliar fashion?
Yes, you can make gold by forcing other elements to undergo nuclear reactions. Shooting neutrons at lead IIRC.
No, it’s not likely it will ever be economical. Unless we run out of almost everything there is, you’re better of just using something else.
It is unlikely to ever be economical, but we can’t rule out the possibility. Some day, we could conceivably discover an exotic form of matter that can catalyze nuclear reactions. There is plenty of nuclear energy available to transmute elements, but there is an enormous energy barrier preventing the reactions that would release this energy. It’s a good thing, otherwise all the hyrdrogen would fuse to make deuterium, helium, and heavier elements. Still, perhaps we’ll some day discover strange forms of matter that will happily gobble up hyrdrogen to produce carbon, occassionally spit out gold nuclei, whole powering our fusion electricity generators. This is highly improbable, but I don’t think it can be proven to be impossible.
I did the math a while back and it turns out that the energy required to turn mercury into gold (via gamma ray) is actually pretty close to the price of gold.
So on first principles it seems like it may be possible if energy gets somewhat cheaper in the future; the problem is that there’s no way to achieve anything close to perfect efficiency. Virtually all of the gamma rays will turn into heat instead of transmuting a mercury nucleus into gold. There’s not much reason to believe that we’ll ever improve this in a significant way.
If anything, wouldn’t it be an economic failure, since you’d basically be making gold worthless, wouldn’t you? If you could make it, it wouldn’t be as rare anymore.
I think I read somewhere though that the alchemists weren’t complete failures, because they discovered a lot of chemicals and base metals in the process.
No, if you could make it cheaply it wouldn’t be worth as much any more. If you can make gold in a factory it would be worth the cost of making it + any mark-up you could get away with because of the emotional value people would place on gold. Same thing as, say, a Mercedes.
Now, it’s the cost of mining it + any mark-up you can get away with because of the emotional value people place on gold.
One: Jewlery quality lab created gemstones aren’t all that cheap.
Two: The gem stone industry promotes natural gemstones as inherently better, and (three) buyers accept this because part of the value of gems is price, artifically inflated or not.
True. And I’ll bet you 100 imaginary gold nuggets that lab-created gold would be less desirable than “real” gold, for exactly the same reasons.
And, like synthetic gemstones, synthetic gold would probably be snapped up by industry, while natural gold would be reserved and price inflated for jewelry.
Even gem-quality synthetic diamonds aren’t all that hard. Last year, the speaker at one of our colloquia showed us a golf-ball-sized diamond that she used as part of one of her experiments.
Yes and Yes. People (thinking people anyway) tend to think that alchemy was a lot like astrology. But that’s wrong. Alchemy gradually evolved into modern chemistry because the alchemists were studying real phenomena. They were unsuccessful in their quest for gold but learned an awful lot of chemistry in the process. Astrology, though, was and remains an utter waste of time. In no sense did it evolve into astronomy.
But with gemstones, it’s always going to be possible to distinguish one that was formed in the earth and one that was formed in the lab. I’m not so sure that would be the case with synthetic gold, since gold is routinely melted down and recast. Maybe it would end up that only gold items that could be verified as having been made before synthetic gold would be valuable.
If you are looking to just make “Green Backs” out of nothing, then I would suggest to check out the “Federal Reserve” where they make Money out of air, ink and paper, I am sure if you look at the ratio in increased value
nothing can beat that…
Maybe it did not “evolve into” astronomy, but we certainly would not have had modern astronomy without it. For millennia (going back to the Babylonians) the main reason that people studied the heavens, made careful measurements, detailed observations, kept records of them, and developed mathematical theories of planetary motion is because they believed this would enable them to cast more accurate horoscopes. Copernicus relied largely on ancient records of planetary motions collected largely for astrological purposes. Furthermore, he could not have developed his heliocentric theory without the sophisticated mathematical geocentric theory of Ptolemy to react against (the mathematical techniques that Copernicus used were developed mostly by Ptolemy and his antecedents and followers), and Ptolemy’s system was probably developed for astrological purposes, and certainly kept alive and refined through the intervening centuries by astrologers.
Even after that, during the scientific revolution, the researches of Tycho Brahe (which was very expensive) and Johannes Kepler were each paid for by wealthy rulers who wanted to have better horoscopes cast for them. As I have pointed out in another recent thread, it was Kepler’s work (relying heavily on the data gathered by Brahe) which did more than anything else (a good deal more than Galileo) to actually establish the truth of heliocentrism. The extent to which Kepler and Brahe themselves actually believed in astrology is unclear (although I think on balance they both probably did believe in some form of it), but in any case their work could not have been done with it as a source of finance.
I don’t disagree with what you say about alchemy, but really the situation with astrology is not very different. On the one hand, the hopeless quest to make cheaper metals turn into gold by chemical means motivated the research through which a lot of real chemistry was discovered. On the other, the hopeless quest to predict people’s future via horoscopes led to a lot of real astronomy being done. We would not have either of the modern sciences if it were not for those ancient pseudosciences.
Arguably we would not have very much math either, today, if some of the more sophisticated aspects of ancient mathematics had not been kept alive through the middle ages largely by Muslim astrologers (and other aspects by numerologists and Kabbalahism, equally superstitious practices).
