GENEVA: Forget fairy tales and wizard wands—real-life scientists at CERN have pulled off the ultimate alchemist’s fantasy. In a twist worthy of science fiction, they’ve turned lead into gold. No spells, just some seriously advanced physics.
This all happened at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest particle accelerator—think of it as a giant underground racetrack where atoms play bumper cars at nearly the speed of light. But instead of full-on crashes, the CERN team tried a soft-touch strategy: they had lead atoms just miss each other.
Turns out, this gentle glancing blow was enough to knock three protons out of a lead atom. And when you remove three protons? Boom—gold atom. Just like that, a basic element swap straight out of a fantasy novel, but all grounded in real, hard science.
Sure, it’s not practical (don’t quit your day job to start mining lead), but the experiment opens doors to understanding how elements form and transform. Plus, it’s just plain cool. Alchemy, meet quantum physics.
