The economy of the whole world depends on gold and the presence of large reserves of gold in any country is considered as a sign of the strength of its economy. Now the question arises that today, when science has progressed so much and the knowledge of alchemy (i.e. chemistry) has so much progressed, scientists have fully understood the internal structure of atoms, artificially creating new atoms in the laboratory. are also being prepared, it has become possible to increase or decrease the amount of electrons and protons within the atom, so can gold be prepared in the laboratory thanks to this scientific development? 


Fortunately, the answer to that question is "yes." It is scientifically possible to make gold and it has been successfully demonstrated in the laboratory. But the fact is that the production of this gold has cost so much that the experiment cannot be called economically profitable in any way.


A scientific attempt to make gold

In 1980, Glenn C. Borg, an American scientist, used a powerful cyclotron to extract protons and neutrons from thousands of lead atoms to convert lead (atomic number 82) into gold (atomic number 79). could The process proved so expensive that the cost of producing one atom of gold was worth several ounces of gold. 


Let's go! Let us briefly explain why the scientific process of making gold is so expensive and "unprofitable". 

Natural process of transformation of elements. We know that all elements are basically composed of atoms and almost all atoms remain in their original state. However, the transformation of one atom into another atom is possible in two ways.

The first method is the conversion of light atoms into heavy atoms, which is called "fusion" in scientific language. This process has been going on in our Sun for millions of years. Under extreme temperature and pressure, two light atoms (hydrogen) combine to form one heavy atom (helium). A lot of energy is produced during this process. This "fusion process" is actually the source of energy for our sun and other such stars.

Another way of changing atoms is "fission" in which a heavy atom is split into two lighter atoms. The atomic bomb is made under the same method. A lot of energy is also generated during this process. But the disadvantage of this method is that this method works only on radioactive atoms (eg Uranium, Thorium etc.). That is, those atoms which are unstable and emit radiation. It is a very difficult and expensive process to break the nucleus of a stable atom and change its number of mojo and protons. 


    Chemical composition of gold 


Gold is a chemical element that has 79 protons in the nucleus of each atom. In theory, we could create gold by collecting only 79 protons (and the same number of neutrons to stabilize the nucleus). Among other scientific methods, the first is that we can extract a proton from mercury (which has 80 protons in its nucleus). Or you can add a proton to platinum (which has 78 protons in its nucleus). Both these methods are simple in theory but very difficult in practice. Adding or removing protons from a nucleus is almost impossible.

 No series of chemical reactions can ever make gold. Chemical reactions change the number and shape of electrons in an atom but leave the nucleus of the atom unchanged. That is, the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom cannot be changed through chemical reactions. As if we can say that the ancient alchemist's dream of creating gold by chemical process alone is almost impossible.

While Glenn C. Borg's method described above, through which gold was made, is very expensive in that the construction of a particle accelerator or cyclotron requires billions of dollars of investment. It takes a lot of energy to perform the head. The process of making gold here is like burning currency notes and cooking bread with their fire. Because lead is stable, it takes a large amount of energy to force it to give up three protons.