12-05-2025
Alchemists rejoice as Cern turns lead into gold — for a flash
In a quiet coup for physics, scientists have achieved what generations of alchemists could only dream of: turning lead into gold.
The feat was achieved not in a dark medieval laboratory, but inside the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Operated by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) and buried deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the LHC is perhaps the largest and most complex machine yet built.
The transmutation, detailed in a paper published in Physical Review Journals, was a side-effect of a high-energy experiment in which two beams of lead atoms were smashed together at close to the speed of light.
• Scientists split over successor to Large Hadron Collider
As they screamed past each other, three protons were
