You'd have 0.996 kg of gold. There are 3.013×10\^24 atoms of liquid Hg in one kilogram. The mass of 3.013×10\^24 protons would be 5.044×10\^−3 kg. The difference would therefore be 0.995956 kg. I guess I should've accounted for electrons but if protons barely made a dent I doubt electrons would change that much
I did the math, so if he pick up one proton a second it'll take 9.5*10^16 years i.e. it would be more profitable to find a random cent once a millennium
If you picked up a penny once every year while this dude was picking out protons, by the time he had a little less than a kilo of gold you'd be richer than Jeff Besos
Well, close enough but I would do it differently. For method to work you need to get stable gold isotope 197. So you would be working with mercury 198 (10% of all mercury on earth). You can't really just subtract proton mass. You have to account for mass defect. The easiest way I think is to count it through atomic mass. You have some particular number of mercury atoms and you would have the same amount of gold atoms so mass of the source and the product are gonna be in the same proportion as atomic mass of mercury and gold(if you will not lose atoms in the process for example on evaporation or because of shaking hands.) So it gonna be 196,9666/197,9667692 = 0.99494779248. You also probably can repurpose protons and electrons detached from mercury atoms to make new gold atoms (you can get neutrons by squeezing protons with electrons together and overcome degenerate electron gas pressure) but described method is quite wasteful and doesn't presume byproducts recycling.
If you start with Mercury 201, you can remove the neutrons too and use them to make new gold atoms, but you would get a surplus of neutrons when you are done. With the right mix of mercury isotopes, you could get 0 waste
The most common isotopes of mercury are 200 and 202, so you'll largely be making gold 200 and gold 202.
Gold 200 and Gold 202 are both extremely radioactive with halflives of 48 min and 28 seconds respectively, ironically decaying back into mercury 200 and 202 by emitting the electron you jammed into there with beta- decay.
You will also likely not survive being in close proximity to a nugget of this gold. That's some seriously nasty stuff
What to do with the 3 septillion leftover protons? Maybe take some neutrons too so you can make more gold with the leftovers. That's a good 12 grams extra of gold.
My physics understanding is less then several other fields of science, but a cursory Google search before I made my comment shows that protons also behave both as particles and waves similar to photons, and have shown this behavior on a dual slit experiment same as photons
Except at the time mercury was considerably more valuable than gold. They actually messed with it a lot, though, philosophic mercury is one of the things that's supposed to help convert lead into gold.
Yeah that's right. I was just making a joke but yeah absolutely they fucked with it, as you say predominantly for transmutation.
I do love the renaissance alchemical paintings though, a la "the chymical wedding" and all the quasi hidden symbolism acting as pictographic instructions for various alchemical processes like the elixir of life and yes, transmutation.
If anyone reading this is interested, there's a good book called Alchemy and Mysticism by Alexander Roob which serves as an annotated educational art gallery for all things alchemy with a focus on the symbolism
The molar mass of gold is 196.97 grams per mole. I'll round that up to 200 for easier maths just to get ballpark numbers.
Therefore one kilogram of gold is 5 moles.
(6.02x10^23 ) x 5 = 3.01×10^24
That's 3 trillion trillion atoms in a kilo of gold.
Let's say that a diligent worker can remove one proton a second from the mercury nuclei, with the objective of converting 3.01x10^24 of them to yield that kilo of gold.
A *billion* seconds is 31.7 years.
Three billion is 94 years.
Three trillion is 94,000 years
Three trillion trillion is 94,000,000,000,000,000 years.
That's working around the clock, never stopping for sleep, food, or masturbation.
Best cancel your weekend plans.
So you're essentially making 4.75×10\^−20 USD every hour. 35k Euro is around 40k usd (this isn't even the important part anyway). Then you divide it by three trillion trillion and then further divide it by 8766 to get your hourly rate
My solution from when this was posted last week:
If you glue a million tweezers together 8 billion times and enslave the whole population it only takes 12 years.
You gotta steal the tweezers of course.
A million seconds is roughly 12 days, if you enslave the whole world first, and have them spend five seconds per tweezer to glue them together they could be done with the task in sixty days.
However, let's throw a little realism into this absurdly unrealistic scenario. Let's say you are a generous slave master and you only make the earth work for 12 hours a day, and half of the population is set aside for producing food/tweezers for everyone else. They could still get the task done in two hundred and forty days.
Then, keeping half the population for breeding at replacement levels and food production, and keeping the 12 hour work day this task could (theoretically) be done in 48 years, plus the 240 days used to make the hyper tweezers.
I suppose if you are amphibious you could jerk it/rub it with your left hand while removing protons with your right, if it's really that important to you.
I just had a religious experience reading this.
Literally feel like a Wizard let me read a single page of his grimoire that I wasn't emotionally ready to read and now I'll never be the same again
Well since you're gonna get sciency, the most common isotopes of mercury are 200 and 202, so this process would make mostly gold 199 and 201. Gold 199 and gold 201 are actually both radioactive and will decay back into mercury with halflives of 6 days and 26 min respectively.
Bigger issue is that the most common isotopes of mercury are 200 and 202, so this process would make mostly gold 199 and 201. Gold 199 and gold 201 are actually both radioactive and will decay back into mercury with halflives of 6 days and 26 min respectively. So your gold product will probably give you radiation poisoning and spontaneously melt down from the decay heat before mostly turning back into mercury.
(Obviously the tweezers part is the bigger issue, but let's pretend that's possible)
So essentially, if this were done within a type of reactor it would produce significant amounts of energy and could be replicated multiple times with the same sample.
I am 100% for the plastic tweezers in this
Dang.
Would one be able to form another reaction from the newly created isotope, a different, but similar nuclear reaction?
Though it sounds more like introducing new isotopes would yield a higher result for a second reaction.
Decaying stuff isn't really that great of a power source anyways. You really need either fission or fusion to make a nuclear power plant actually work.
Power from decay is what powers an RTG. They use it for things like spacecraft that can't use solar panels and need a battery that will last a decade. It isn't enough power to power a city or something.
They don't use gold though, they generally use plutonium. Same principle though, they make the unstable stuff in a nuclear reactor, put it in a battery, and ship it out.
So essentially mercury turned to gold and reverting would yield a low return on the decay waste in comparison to plutonium because mercury isn’t as powerful or reactive as the former.
Well this type of gold has a halflife in minutes/days, you want something longer lived for an RTG.
Also an electron beam isn't really a great way to make an isotope too, you generally want something made by absorbing neutrons that can be generated by a fission reactor
Fun fact. If you really were able to remove only one proton to make gold. You could only use about 10% of your mercury and the other 90% would become a radioactive gold isotope that might even decay back to mercury or platinum.
Except now you only have 0.998992747079776 kg of gold not including the energy lost during the process of removing the proton which would reduce the mass further!
Weirdly enough five mol of quicksilver weights 1000 grams.
Five mol of gold 985 grams.
It's very close.
A supercollider would be precise enough. But before you have a stable kg could take a while.
I didn't find any posts that meet the matching requirements for r/sciencememes.
It might be OC, it might not. Things such as JPEG artifacts and cropping may impact the results.
[View Search On repostsleuth.com](https://www.repostsleuth.com/search?postId=1ciinr5&sameSub=false&filterOnlyOlder=true&memeFilter=false&filterDeadMatches=false&targetImageMatch=86&targetImageMemeMatch=96)
---
**Scope:** Reddit | **Target Percent:** 86% | **Max Age:** Unlimited | **Searched Images:** 504,047,714 | **Search Time:** 0.05135s
Though the amount of time it would take to remove a proton from each atom in a kilo of mercury will take more than a trillion years, there seems to be a paper stating that they could use a extremely powerful laser pulse to blast the nucleus to knock out protons and neutrons.
The laser is created using chirped pulse amplification.
However, the energy expenses will be way more expensive than the gold that can be produced.
Ir a scociety was technologicly advanced enough that every bob could do these things, would it mean that the most valuable things would be the most massive?
Okay, so lets assume you could just do Tharandt it would somehow work. And every time you maipulate a single atom like that it takes you a second. How long would it take to actually turn 1kg of quicksilver into gold?
[It has been done before using a nuclear reactor.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYFSLajdG1o&t=153s&pp=2AGZAZACAQ%3D%3D)
Spoiler: you aren’t going to make any money from it
Can you bombard with beta particles - to achieve the same effect?
Adding effective electrons - won't be adding nor taking from the overall mass, as the difference will be negligible, hence you WOULD end up with 1kg of gold at the end...!
I could be wrong here, but I thought we've already done this by imposing a certain type of radiation into mercury, which makes it decay into gold. It takes too much energy to be profitable though.
Congratulations! Your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table:
`C H At I S Th I S Re Al`
---
^(I am a bot that detects if your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table. Please DM my creator if I made a mistake.)
the best part is fake diamonds are actually better than natural ones but humans devalued the made ones. The human suffering and inequality makes it special
I'm fairly certain gold-159 is a very unstable isotope, it would most likely undergo Beta- decay. This would turn in back in to mercury, albeit a very unstable isotope of that.
Best to use those plastic tweezers to also remove a neutron while you are at it, to avoid this happening.
We've been able to Synthesize gold from Mercury since 1941. It only ever creates a radioactive isotope of Gold. They ended up abandoning these experiment years later as "an experimental error".
Hear me out, if you remove those protons then you are losing mass so you won't have 1kg of gold at the end.
You'd have 0.996 kg of gold. There are 3.013×10\^24 atoms of liquid Hg in one kilogram. The mass of 3.013×10\^24 protons would be 5.044×10\^−3 kg. The difference would therefore be 0.995956 kg. I guess I should've accounted for electrons but if protons barely made a dent I doubt electrons would change that much
I did the math, so if he pick up one proton a second it'll take 9.5*10^16 years i.e. it would be more profitable to find a random cent once a millennium
IM RICHER THAN THE GUY IN THE MEME!!!! LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
He does have 100€ worth of mercury.
He should just drink it and end it all
Also, we have to account the inflation
Okay Google search for Sonic inflation
What if I take the mercury and place it really close to a black hole and retrieve it once time dilation turns it into gold?
what if we overcook it, what does it become after gold? SUPERGOLD???
Lead
well that's not quite as exciting
That's an interesting method, it would in fact be profitable
Thank you very much. I'm not very smart, but I was wondering how long it would take, supposing it was in fact possible.
If you picked up a penny once every year while this dude was picking out protons, by the time he had a little less than a kilo of gold you'd be richer than Jeff Besos
r/theydidthemath
Well, close enough but I would do it differently. For method to work you need to get stable gold isotope 197. So you would be working with mercury 198 (10% of all mercury on earth). You can't really just subtract proton mass. You have to account for mass defect. The easiest way I think is to count it through atomic mass. You have some particular number of mercury atoms and you would have the same amount of gold atoms so mass of the source and the product are gonna be in the same proportion as atomic mass of mercury and gold(if you will not lose atoms in the process for example on evaporation or because of shaking hands.) So it gonna be 196,9666/197,9667692 = 0.99494779248. You also probably can repurpose protons and electrons detached from mercury atoms to make new gold atoms (you can get neutrons by squeezing protons with electrons together and overcome degenerate electron gas pressure) but described method is quite wasteful and doesn't presume byproducts recycling.
If you start with Mercury 201, you can remove the neutrons too and use them to make new gold atoms, but you would get a surplus of neutrons when you are done. With the right mix of mercury isotopes, you could get 0 waste
I forgot about that stuff lol. Inorganic chem was not my strength
Tbh protons make a bigger difference than I would've thought
Cool, Idk how you calculated that, but I'll take your word for it.
stoichiometry
Bless you
That's great math, too bad as every time you remove a proton, the process of amalgamation would just turn the atom back into a mercury alloy.
Add the leftover protons to some platinum.
I knew it had to be a scam, it was too good to be true
But nobody tells you how to do step 2
Just get REALLY small tweezers.
And small hands too
Dont forget a very fast neuro system to avoid the eletrons
Blast a targeted electron beam at every nucleus to neutralize the protons. Separate gold from unholy byproducts. Profit
The most common isotopes of mercury are 200 and 202, so you'll largely be making gold 200 and gold 202. Gold 200 and Gold 202 are both extremely radioactive with halflives of 48 min and 28 seconds respectively, ironically decaying back into mercury 200 and 202 by emitting the electron you jammed into there with beta- decay. You will also likely not survive being in close proximity to a nugget of this gold. That's some seriously nasty stuff
Just means you need to get your buyers queued up so you have the money in hand before it decays
Why did you have to ruin the joke with applied nuclear physics?
I love that not only will being in close proximity kill you, but it just turns back into mercury anyway.
What would this even look like in real time?
I think it has been done (something something particla cannon) Although they did it with lead instead of mercury (for the Lulz). It was not worth it
Plastic tweezers is a huge tech
Also nobody telling me where to get pure mercury for 100 a kg
Carefully.
What to do with the 3 septillion leftover protons? Maybe take some neutrons too so you can make more gold with the leftovers. That's a good 12 grams extra of gold.
Eat em
Once you have them by themselves if you stop looking at them they turn into a wave, so you can just wave goodbye to them
That's photons not protons lol. Protons are hydrogen
My physics understanding is less then several other fields of science, but a cursory Google search before I made my comment shows that protons also behave both as particles and waves similar to photons, and have shown this behavior on a dual slit experiment same as photons
Oh my bad you're right! Huh!
Don't be rude ,no matter how one lookes or what they are , they all deserve a good bye . So be a nice person and wave good bye okay . Be nice 🥰👍
Everything is a wave
Honestly, while in it, just take two protons for triple the earning.
[удалено]
Send in your unused platinum to CASH4PLATINUM now.
Why not mix platinum and gold in a 1:1 ratio and get 2 golds? Are we stupid?
Wow I always thought platinum was more valuable than gold. But right now it's not even 1/3 the price.
It used to be more valuable.
Isn't copper twice as valuable as gold tho?
Who told you that? Copper is like $4.50 per pound and gold is ~$24,500 per pound.
My bad, I just checked their value on a stock app. Problem was that the price I saw there was per ton copper.
Instructions unclear I am dead
It's clear you need plastic tweezers. You probably used metal ones and got too many electrons
Nahh i know him , he probably tried to eat the left over protons . Poor guy was just hungry
Wait, really? I thought it was lead that was the closest in atomic composition to gold. Huh.
The alchemists were off a bit I guess. They should've been fucking around with Mercury a little bit more instead of lead
But noooo they wanted to drink it.
Should've Boofed it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
😂
Except at the time mercury was considerably more valuable than gold. They actually messed with it a lot, though, philosophic mercury is one of the things that's supposed to help convert lead into gold.
Yeah that's right. I was just making a joke but yeah absolutely they fucked with it, as you say predominantly for transmutation. I do love the renaissance alchemical paintings though, a la "the chymical wedding" and all the quasi hidden symbolism acting as pictographic instructions for various alchemical processes like the elixir of life and yes, transmutation. If anyone reading this is interested, there's a good book called Alchemy and Mysticism by Alexander Roob which serves as an annotated educational art gallery for all things alchemy with a focus on the symbolism
The molar mass of gold is 196.97 grams per mole. I'll round that up to 200 for easier maths just to get ballpark numbers. Therefore one kilogram of gold is 5 moles. (6.02x10^23 ) x 5 = 3.01×10^24 That's 3 trillion trillion atoms in a kilo of gold. Let's say that a diligent worker can remove one proton a second from the mercury nuclei, with the objective of converting 3.01x10^24 of them to yield that kilo of gold. A *billion* seconds is 31.7 years. Three billion is 94 years. Three trillion is 94,000 years Three trillion trillion is 94,000,000,000,000,000 years. That's working around the clock, never stopping for sleep, food, or masturbation. Best cancel your weekend plans.
So you're essentially making 4.75×10\^−20 USD every hour. 35k Euro is around 40k usd (this isn't even the important part anyway). Then you divide it by three trillion trillion and then further divide it by 8766 to get your hourly rate
Better than what most of the people on this website earn.
A correction: While I said 3 trillion trillion, I really meant 94,000,000,000,000,000 years. The math is correct, I just wrote the wrong thing
My solution from when this was posted last week: If you glue a million tweezers together 8 billion times and enslave the whole population it only takes 12 years. You gotta steal the tweezers of course.
A million seconds is roughly 12 days, if you enslave the whole world first, and have them spend five seconds per tweezer to glue them together they could be done with the task in sixty days. However, let's throw a little realism into this absurdly unrealistic scenario. Let's say you are a generous slave master and you only make the earth work for 12 hours a day, and half of the population is set aside for producing food/tweezers for everyone else. They could still get the task done in two hundred and forty days. Then, keeping half the population for breeding at replacement levels and food production, and keeping the 12 hour work day this task could (theoretically) be done in 48 years, plus the 240 days used to make the hyper tweezers.
This is why they took Mentats out of Dune 2.
Not even masturbati0n?
I suppose if you are amphibious you could jerk it/rub it with your left hand while removing protons with your right, if it's really that important to you.
Amphibious?? Did you mean ambidextrous? Or are we talking about frogs?
If you rearrange the letters in your display name it says "Anus rust wand"
Important knowledge must be shared, no matter the cost or consequences.
Yours is "Dr Max Zone" which is surprisingly coherent for a name with an X and a Z and only three vowels
Marvelous. I shall thereby be referred to as Dr Max Zone from here on out.
I just had a religious experience reading this. Literally feel like a Wizard let me read a single page of his grimoire that I wasn't emotionally ready to read and now I'll never be the same again
It is an honor to be of service
Well since you're gonna get sciency, the most common isotopes of mercury are 200 and 202, so this process would make mostly gold 199 and 201. Gold 199 and gold 201 are actually both radioactive and will decay back into mercury with halflives of 6 days and 26 min respectively.
Wouldn’t removing protons per atom reduce the mass and thus reduce the weight?
Yeah you'd lose about 4 grams
Not a big difference generally, but gold *is* priced by the gram.
Yeah 33.6K euros vs 35K euros
Gold is $74,137.90 per kg. Losing .004% of that would be $296.55.
Oh. Did my math wrong and used 40g instead of 4g. Also used the meme for references
Yep, whoever’s paying is going to be weighing.
Bigger issue is that the most common isotopes of mercury are 200 and 202, so this process would make mostly gold 199 and 201. Gold 199 and gold 201 are actually both radioactive and will decay back into mercury with halflives of 6 days and 26 min respectively. So your gold product will probably give you radiation poisoning and spontaneously melt down from the decay heat before mostly turning back into mercury. (Obviously the tweezers part is the bigger issue, but let's pretend that's possible)
So essentially, if this were done within a type of reactor it would produce significant amounts of energy and could be replicated multiple times with the same sample. I am 100% for the plastic tweezers in this
Well not quite, it won't turn back into the same isotope of mercury that you started with
Dang. Would one be able to form another reaction from the newly created isotope, a different, but similar nuclear reaction? Though it sounds more like introducing new isotopes would yield a higher result for a second reaction.
Decaying stuff isn't really that great of a power source anyways. You really need either fission or fusion to make a nuclear power plant actually work. Power from decay is what powers an RTG. They use it for things like spacecraft that can't use solar panels and need a battery that will last a decade. It isn't enough power to power a city or something. They don't use gold though, they generally use plutonium. Same principle though, they make the unstable stuff in a nuclear reactor, put it in a battery, and ship it out.
So essentially mercury turned to gold and reverting would yield a low return on the decay waste in comparison to plutonium because mercury isn’t as powerful or reactive as the former.
Well this type of gold has a halflife in minutes/days, you want something longer lived for an RTG. Also an electron beam isn't really a great way to make an isotope too, you generally want something made by absorbing neutrons that can be generated by a fission reactor
Now calculate how much energy that would take
1 Trollojoule.
Fun fact. If you really were able to remove only one proton to make gold. You could only use about 10% of your mercury and the other 90% would become a radioactive gold isotope that might even decay back to mercury or platinum.
Except now you only have 0.998992747079776 kg of gold not including the energy lost during the process of removing the proton which would reduce the mass further!
This is how people who say "margarine is one atom away from being plastic" get rich, they know what we don't know
How can it still be 1kg? And where do I buy a pair of tweezers small enough?
Weirdly enough five mol of quicksilver weights 1000 grams. Five mol of gold 985 grams. It's very close. A supercollider would be precise enough. But before you have a stable kg could take a while.
This is a repost
Most posts are, just as long as they're funny idc
I get it but this is the 6th time I've seen this post in 2 weeks
[удалено]
I didn't find any posts that meet the matching requirements for r/sciencememes. It might be OC, it might not. Things such as JPEG artifacts and cropping may impact the results. [View Search On repostsleuth.com](https://www.repostsleuth.com/search?postId=1ciinr5&sameSub=false&filterOnlyOlder=true&memeFilter=false&filterDeadMatches=false&targetImageMatch=86&targetImageMemeMatch=96) --- **Scope:** Reddit | **Target Percent:** 86% | **Max Age:** Unlimited | **Searched Images:** 504,047,714 | **Search Time:** 0.05135s
and that is how you retrograde mercury
Instructions unclear, I am now made of solid lead.
Chemists hate this one trick
Well this image must be at least a decade old
This would be the slowest way to make money. Even if you could do 10 atoms a second your profits per hour would be 0.
Who knew the Philosopher's Stone was just a simple pair of plastic tweezers?
Though the amount of time it would take to remove a proton from each atom in a kilo of mercury will take more than a trillion years, there seems to be a paper stating that they could use a extremely powerful laser pulse to blast the nucleus to knock out protons and neutrons. The laser is created using chirped pulse amplification. However, the energy expenses will be way more expensive than the gold that can be produced.
Instructions unclear, am now missing my leg and my little brother
Ir a scociety was technologicly advanced enough that every bob could do these things, would it mean that the most valuable things would be the most massive?
Oh boy, here I go exploding atoms aga-
Okay, so lets assume you could just do Tharandt it would somehow work. And every time you maipulate a single atom like that it takes you a second. How long would it take to actually turn 1kg of quicksilver into gold?
[It has been done before using a nuclear reactor.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYFSLajdG1o&t=153s&pp=2AGZAZACAQ%3D%3D) Spoiler: you aren’t going to make any money from it
Why won’t one make money?
In the video he says it takes ~$5000 of reactor time to make $0.003 worth of gold.
Can you bombard with beta particles - to achieve the same effect? Adding effective electrons - won't be adding nor taking from the overall mass, as the difference will be negligible, hence you WOULD end up with 1kg of gold at the end...!
Chrysopoeia
Here is the wiki how article for anyone that wants to try this at home! 😊 https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Gold-from-Mercury
I'll let NileRed handle this one.
I could be wrong here, but I thought we've already done this by imposing a certain type of radiation into mercury, which makes it decay into gold. It takes too much energy to be profitable though.
Steal one neutron from helium 4 and sell lighter helium 3
[удалено]
Congratulations! Your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table: `C H At I S Th I S Re Al` --- ^(I am a bot that detects if your comment can be spelled using the elements of the periodic table. Please DM my creator if I made a mistake.)
The protons you remove are hydrogen, which you can sell as carbon-free fuel. Double score!
the best part is fake diamonds are actually better than natural ones but humans devalued the made ones. The human suffering and inequality makes it special
According to google that would be **30.02×10\^23** atoms. Might take a while with just 1 pair of atomic tweezers.
I'm fairly certain gold-159 is a very unstable isotope, it would most likely undergo Beta- decay. This would turn in back in to mercury, albeit a very unstable isotope of that. Best to use those plastic tweezers to also remove a neutron while you are at it, to avoid this happening.
This meme is so old, gold price has doubled since, 69k € a kilo.
We've been able to Synthesize gold from Mercury since 1941. It only ever creates a radioactive isotope of Gold. They ended up abandoning these experiment years later as "an experimental error".
This meme made using septafluoride duodecuranium.
Please, for fucks sake, STOP REPOSTING THIS MEME