{"id":165012,"date":"2023-06-02T20:27:02","date_gmt":"2023-06-03T01:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/turning-lead-into-gold"},"modified":"2023-06-02T20:27:02","modified_gmt":"2023-06-03T01:27:02","slug":"turning-lead-into-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/turning-lead-into-gold","title":{"rendered":"Turning Lead Into Gold"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/turning-lead-into-gold.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Year 2021 \ud83d\ude17\ud83d\ude01<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>They were indeed correct that lead could be turned into gold \u2014 even if they were dead wrong about how it could be done. Now, modern science routinely takes us far beyond even the wildest dreams of the alchemists.<\/p>\n<p>One of the most famous stories of nuclear transmutation comes from the 1970s, when nuclear chemist and Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory alongside colleague Walt Loveland and then-graduate student Dave Morrissey. The scientists were using a super-heavy ion linear accelerator to bombard atoms with ions as heavy as uranium at relativistic speeds. \u201cAmong the ones we bombarded was lead-208,\u201d Loveland says.<\/p>\n<p>Accelerating the ions close to the speed of light allowed them to study nuclear reaction mechanisms. \u201cWe would measure the products, mostly concentrating on the yields,\u201d Loveland says. Some of those yields were gold. \u201cIt was all relatively routine stuff. Then Seaborg said, \u2018Hey, look at this \u2014 you\u2019re transforming lead into gold, doing the alchemists\u2019 dream reaction.\u2019\u201d He suggested that Morrissey write a paper on the research and present it at the upcoming American Chemical Society annual meeting in Miami.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Year 2021 \ud83d\ude17\ud83d\ude01 They were indeed correct that lead could be turned into gold \u2014 even if they were dead wrong about how it could be done. Now, modern science routinely takes us far beyond even the wildest dreams of the alchemists. One of the most famous stories of nuclear transmutation comes from the 1970s, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}