Politics and science have combined to wipe $225 an ounce off the price of gold in three weeks with worse to come if peace takes hold in war zones and if an experiment in man-made gold moves out of its laboratory phase.
The fall from a peak of $3433 an ounce on April 22 to around $3208/oz today was caused largely by the promise of peace in Ukraine and Gaza and an easing of tariffs in the U.S. v China trade war.
But, in Europe the attention of gold investors turned to the results of an experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (commonly call CERN) where microscopic particles of gold were created in a world first.
Dialing down the political heat was the primary reason for the recent gold price decline, coupled with investor concern about the ability of gold to keep rising after its breakneck 30% rush up since the start of the year.
Events at CERN have received little print-space or airtime because they are at the frontier of science with little obvious commercial application without a massive investment in a privately owned Ion Collider to replicate the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the border of France and Switzerland.
It was inside the LHC that lead was turned into gold, albeit for an estimated 11 microseconds, or 0.000011 of a second, only to be immediately destroyed.
Alchemists Holy Grail
A way to turn lead into gold was once the holy grail of alchemists in the Middle Ages who had noted the similarities in the weight of the two metals.
It was during an experiment in the LHC, which saw lead ions accelerated close to the speed of light before smashing into other lead ions, that super-sensitive measuring equipment detected the creation of gold.
The process, known as chrysopoeia, was achieved because lead and gold are remarkably similar at the atomic level with gold having a nucleus and 79 protons while lead has 82 protons.
The two metals appear on the same line in the periodic table with their proton count and also their atomic number separated only by mercury (80) and thallium (81).
CERN said in a statement published last week that extremely high-energy collisions between lead nuclei at the LHC can create quark-gluon plasma, a hot and dense state of matter thought to have filled the universe around a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, giving rise to matter as we know it.
However, a more common result is a process called electromagnetic dissociation which can see a small number of protons stripped off a lead ion with the removal of three protons effectively turning lead with its 82 protons into gold with its 79.
The experiments are reported to have created 178,000 gold atoms every second, a modest start in creating a gram of gold which contains 3057 billion billions of atoms (3057 and 18 zeroes).
Work at CERN is at the cutting edge of science but that’s also a place where science can be the breeding ground for business ideas.
If, and it’s a genuine moon-shot, what’s happening at CERN makes its way into the commercial world the concept of gold being an item of scarcity could be challenged though it’s not something governments would like to see because their central banks are the biggest owners and biggest buyers of gold.
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