Sean Bradley

National Alchemic Institute: 26 - 29 December 2009

The transmutation of Pb into Au with reference to the natural laws

Introduction
One of the guiding principles of Alchemy has always been equivalent exchange. However
one of the major problems young alchemists have with understanding this principle stems
from the way it is understood by the general public. The law stands as thus:
To gain anything, something of equal value must be lost.
The misinterpretation of this simple sentence has often led to many accidents causing injury
and in some tragic cases death and so I shall first of all try to illuminate this concept for it is
one of the fundamental concepts in all alchemy. It means simply this: the product can only be
formed from equivalent reactants, the product cannot contain anything that was not present in
the reactants nor can anything present in the reactant simply cease to be. How then is lead to
gold conversion possible? For surely lead and gold are not equivalent! You cannot simply go
from Pb to Au and claim that they are equivalent, nor can you say mass is conserved! And yet,
it is possible, so possible that the government felt the need to make it illegal to safeguard the
economy. Therefore logically you must realise that there is something more produce so that
mass is conserved and that it has gone unnoticed simply because it cannot be seen! And it is
that which I have set out to explain. I will try in these pages to prove absolutely that changing
lead into gold is not only plausible but that this change obeys all physical laws.
The creation of an equation
Let us then start simply by first isolating the actual equation as Pb
Au is quite definitely
not the actual reaction the balancing is not even close to right on any level we go from 82Pb
to 79Au, 3 protons cannot simply disappear. And what of the 7 neutrons and 3 electrons also
unaccounted for? Putting them in gives us the equation below:
82
207

79
197

+ 3 + 7 + 3

The equation now balances but it is far from neat and the end products arent exactly stable,
but since we are making gold why not add a little more profit by making a second product
which is stable and possibly commercially viable? Well we have 3 protons and 3 electrons
why not a form of lithium? It is relatively rare and so possibly could make us some money
after all this means there is no waste as both products can be put to use to make profit.
Unfortunately the number of neutrons means it would be a rather heavy isotope that just

doesnt really occur naturally it is chemically unstable and would probably be radioactive,
safe? I think not. So then something stable and safe... the products from a single pass do not
give us anything good so what if we double it? 6 protons so Boron? Boron - 20? But boron
likes Boron 11, Im not even sure of the properties of 20Br...
20 however gave me an idea. Try to think of a stable element that is safe and possibly either
valuable or otherwise hard to obtain with a mass of 20? Any ideas? Would it help if I told
you that it was so rare the only way it has been produced commercially is by distillation from
the atmosphere? Neon. Oh but wait! Neon has 10 protons and 10 neutrons we currently have
6 protons and 14 neutrons it gives us the 20 nucleons total but not the right number of protons
or neutrons. Plus neon is stable so it doesnt form charged particles it has to have 10 electrons
and we have 6. If only there where a way to change 4 of those neutrons into protons and gain
4 electrons in the process. It was then I remember studying a process called decay by which
a proton turns into a neutron or a neutron turns into a proton. I was pretty sure that decay
also produces electrons and neutrinos but I cant remember which form produces the
electrons and which produces the positrons, if the neutron to proton decay produces positrons
then this channel would be able to go no further because it would lower the electron count
even more. Time to consult the Feynman diagrams.
- Decay, a neutron (u, d, d) becomes a proton (u, u, d) emitting a w- boson that decays into a
- particle (an electron), and an electron antineutrino.

+ Decay, a proton (u, u, d) become a neutron (u, d, d) emitting a w+ boson that decays into a
+ particle (a positron), and an electron neutrino.

- Decay then provides us with both the missing protons and the missing electrons with the
by-product of antineutrinos which have no charge and negligible mass and serves only to

balance out the electron lepton number on each side, but more on that later, so if we do it four
times we can make our neon. Remembering that we also have to times our first equation by
two.
2 2 + 6 + 14 + 6
6 + 14 + 6 + 4
Combine them to get:
2 + 6 + 14 + 6 2 + + 6 + 14 + 6 + 4
Effectively then the overall result is this:
2 2 + + 4
Final checks:
Condition
Charge
Bryon No.
Electron lepton No.

LHS
0
207 x 2 = 414
0

RHS
0
2x 197 +20 = 414
+4 -4 = 0

Conserved?

Charge Electrical charge cannot be created of destroyed. The charge, Q, of a system is

given by: 1 = 2 +
No charge enters or leaves the system the charge must be constant.
1

Baryon Number Baryon number of a particle: = 3

In standard model particle physics baryon number must be conserved.
Electron lepton Number is the number of electrons, protons, electron neutrinos and electron
antineutrinos present. Electrons and electron neutrinos have a value of +1 whilst their anti
particles, positrons and electron antineutrinos, have a value -1.
Now that the theory and equation has been written it is time to begin with the array.