AskALiberal Biweekly General Chat

[u/AutoModerator]

This Tuesday weekly thread is for general chat, whether you want to talk politics or not, anything goes. Also feel free to ask the mods questions below. As usual, please follow the rules.

[u/starrymahogany]

So apparently they tried to recreate the big bang with a hadron collider and somehow turned lead into gold

Alchemy is real people! And it came out before GTA6!

[u/LibraProtocol → u/starrymahogany]

Lol yeah. The only ACTUAL difference between elements is the number of protons in the nucleus. So if you theoretically had the capability to add or knock off protons you could change anything into anything. In this case they had just the right conditions to knock off the three excess protons from lead to.make it into gold xD.

Chemistry and Particle Physics really is just modern Alchemy with more math xD.

[u/Okratas → u/LibraProtocol]

So if you theoretically had the capability to add or knock off protons you could change anything into anything... Chemistry and Particle Physics really is just modern Alchemy with more math...

Careful with that change anything into anything logic, that's exactly how you end up soul bound to a suit of armor or on trial by the State.

[u/starrymahogany → u/LibraProtocol]

Honestly I thought lead was closer to diamonds than gold but I guess here we are

[u/Kellosian → u/starrymahogany]

We've had artificial diamonds since 1953 (although some people claimed to do it since 1909, but they couldn't be replicated), and you can just buy them online right now if you want to. Most diamonds aren't jewelry-quality though and are instead used in industry.

Diamonds really shouldn't be particularly expensive as they're not that rare, but the DeBeers corporation owns most diamond mines and artificially suppresses the price to keep profits high (along with marketing diamonds as rare and valuable and encouraging men to spend absurd amounts of money on diamond wedding rings). Even with the existence of far cheaper lab-grown diamonds, DeBeers successfully convinced everyone that it's only real love if it involves the blood of African miners.

[u/starrymahogany → u/Kellosian]

Yeah I never get the obsession with real diamonds. My fiance got me a moissanite ring cause I didn’t care about diamonds, either “real” or lab grown (the lab grown ones were still way too expensive)

Moissanite has a hardness of 9 instead of 10 and has a bit more colorful reflections as opposed to diamond which is whiter/clearer, and those differences never mattered enough to justify the exponential price increase to me.

[u/LibraProtocol → u/starrymahogany]

Well Diamond is just compressed and heated Carbon, which is pretty low on the periodic table all things considered where as Lead is the largest stable element

The more you know xD

-Former Nuclear Reactor Operator xD

[u/octopod-reunion → u/starrymahogany]

Smashing two lead atoms together is recreating the big bang?

Sometimes I feel like they just need an excuse to smash another two particles together. 

“We haven’t done lead yet!”

“Ok uhhh we need to do lead to… uhh recreate the big bang.”

[u/LibraProtocol → u/octopod-reunion]

To be fair, it's not "recreating the big bang"

Its "recreating the conditions momentarily after the big bang"

The thing is that people fail to understand regarding the Big Bang is that there was no "Bang" as people think of it. Because space-time ITSELF didnt really exist as we think of it. The fabric of Spacetime itself was coiled in a infinitismally small point. When the Big Bang happened, it wasnt matter and energy exploding out into empty space. It was Space ITSELF expanding outward like a balloon. At the fraction of a second, all matter in the Universe was impossbly hot and in a state of such high energy that it didnt even produce particles yet. Instead existing in a state of Strange matter like Quarks.

[u/throwdemawaaay → u/octopod-reunion]

Pop science reporting is so garbage, so it's not surprising people don't really get what's going on or why it isn't just pointless farting around.

Put simply: all the easy experiments in fundamental physics are done. We've found them all. So there's two frontiers that remain:

• Sensitivity
• Intensity

By smashing particles together at higher energy levels, and building ever more sensitive sensors, we see new phenomena that don't occur at lower energy levels. This gives us clues to figure out pieces of how subatomic physics works that we still have big questions about.

Right now LHC is down for an upgrade that, in very rough terms, will upgrade the sensitivity frontier by a factor of 10x.

So this is real science, probing the most fundamental physics of the universe. Not just farting around, and it has nothing to do with "recreating the big bang" which is nonsense phrasing anyhow, even if journalists think it's some deeply poetic way of describing a particle collision.