Is it possible to turn base metals into gold

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All Rights Reserved. Having the ability to turn lead into gold would have obvious benefits today, but the reason behind why ancient and medieval alchemists sought to change base metals into gold was not simply greed.

The basest metal, lead, represented the sinful and unrepentant individual who was readily overcome by the forces of darkness… If lead and gold both consisted of fire, air, water, and earth, then surely by changing the proportions of the constituent elements, lead could be transformed into gold. Gold was superior to lead because, by its very nature, it contained the perfect balance of all four elements.

Further to this, the joint experiments carried out by Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy in the early 20th century proved that the radioactivity of thorium was the result of a disintegration or decay process of one element into another.

The amount of gold produced was so small that Morrissey and his colleagues had to identify it by measuring the radiation given off by unstable gold nuclei as they decayed over the course of a year. In addition to the several radioactive isotopes of gold, the particle collisions presumably produced some amount of the stable isotope gold —the stuff of wedding bands and gold bullion—but because it does not decay the researchers were unable to confirm its presence.

Some of the collisions would be expected to remove three protons from lead, or one proton from mercury, to produce gold. Glenn Seaborg, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with heavy elements and who died in , was the senior author on the resulting study. The going rate for an ounce of gold at the time? John Matson is a former reporter and editor for Scientific American who has written extensively about astronomy and physics.

Follow John Matson on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Science still has a long way to go.

Any views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold. Please check back for new articles and updates at Commoditytrademantra. Where did this woman get the idea of turning lead into gold? Can base metals such as lead actually be transmuted into gold? Surprisingly the answer is yes.