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So please don't laugh at me, but I've been pondering an problem for a while now, and I'm needing some help. I'm not a chemistry/physics student, but I understand the basics to have at least gotten this far.. and so please, don't laugh.
I'm trying to work out the equation of how to turn oxygen into gold. I know, alchemy, right? It has to be fundamentally possible, as this essentially what a fusion reaction is. Not even our sun has enough energy to make this possible, but again, at some level, it is possible. If money (or energy) were no object, how could I write an equation that takes a simple oxygen atom or molecule, and balances out on the other side with gold as a byproduct?
I'm sure, shooting a goldbar into the Sun will cause random nuclear processes producing smallar particles, and one of them will be oxygen.
Not very expensive enterprise
Remember safety first! Check MSDS and consult with professionals before performing risky experiments.
You cannot tutn oxygen to gold by chemical means, your only hope is to bombard oxygen atom with helium atoms and hope that it will turn to heavier atoms. However there is 71 elements between oxygen and gold, including 4 noble gases. So If I remememer corectly, you would need 18 transformations to get from oxygen to mercury and then your mercury atom would need to undergo beta+ emmision to turn to gold 80. Which I would say will be highly unstable. And of course, im not counting the fact that most of your alpha decays would not yield that desired particles and even then most of them would be unstable.
So as far as I know, its impossible task but if you somehow manage to do that, you would get nobel prize for sure.
