Obviously alchemy was a scientific dead-end in early modern European times, but is contemporary science advancing towards a place where lead (or some other metal) can be turned into gold? And in a way that will be profitable?
Mercury was transmuted into gold in 1941.
As for economic transmutation - there are more valuable things than gold. The obvious one is plutonium, made from uranium by transmutation in nuclear reactors.
The classic lead-into-gold has also been done, though it’s actually much easier to turn gold into lead.
But yeah, with gold specifically as the goal, it’s far from profitable, and probably never will be.
Even if the technology become better, and it uses less resources to make gold, the value of gold is in its rarity, so if it were easier to make, it would be worth less.
In the limit as it becomes closer to free to transmute materials, useful materials like iron will become more valuable.
The only way that nuclear transmutation could ever be “profitable”, i.e. capable of being performed at a scale necessary to produce large masses of stable precious metals would be to have fine control over the the residual nuclear strong force. Right now, our only way of influencing nuclear reactions is either to bombard nuclei with neutrons (produced at great expense) or by accelerating heavy ions at a target, and accepting the relatively small statistical likelihood of an interaction (capture), which requires some of the most expensive and power-hungry machines on the planet. We have no idea how or if such fine control is even possible with current physics, and if it were the ‘profit’ would be kind of irrelevant since you could literally make any element or compound with that kind of fine control over atomic and nuclear structure. Unless this ability were somehow contained to a small priesthood of special luminaries, there would be literally no ‘value’ in any natural material and any baryonic matter could be a feedstock to build your gold-and-platinum castle.
Of course, when modern science fiction considers such a capability at all, they use to to explain a machine that can make chocolate sundaes and “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot” upon demand. “He’s such a dullard, isn’t he?”
Stranger
Gold is pretty much worthless. Even insane goldbugs are using cryptocurrency to replace gold as the subject of their fever dreams.
OTOH, the global GDP is over $100 trillion. I’d estimate the majority of that staggering amount has been created by procedures that the ancients would consider alchemy. Why even consider such a piddling bit of nothingness as lead into gold?
Newton spent a lot of time messing around with alchemy. Ĥe discovered the hard way that it was a waste of time.
I remember reading in a biography of Admiral Rickover. During the development of naval reactors for submarines it was discovered the nuclear reaction was transmuting lead into gold. Rickover raised an eyebrow, really how much is it worth, sadly only milligrams, just a few pennies.
I have some vague recollection that turning gold into lead has some utility because an isotopically pure lead can be made, which is useful for . . . something.
Google keeps returning lead-to-gold results. I’ll need to refine my search.
Wasn’t there an episode of the 1950s Superman where a nutty scientist invented a gold making machine fueled by platinum?
They were just ahead of their time. Gold is now worth twice as much.
Gold is useful, as a conductor and reflector and is super-malleable and dense, so if it did become common through easy alchemy, it would find lots of uses.