More seriously you could argue that the whole reason for the LHC is to turn matter/energy of one form into matter/energy ( stuff ) of another.

Though rather than lead into gold, it's known stuff into unknown or previously unseen but predicted stuff.

So it is, in fact, a giant Alchemy machine. Newton would have been proud.

Particle accelerators smash together stuff we know about in order to make stuff we don't know much about so we can study it. There's an ELI5 for ya.

So they were just waiting for the price of gold to reach a value that made lead=>gold justifiable? I'm expecting a Discovery TV show about the new Gold Rush. Maybe Parker will go all in?

> It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively expensive :)

Really? I thought, it was one of the Newton's doom which couldn't be achieved.

When did humanity know alchemy is a real science?

The knowledge about the possibility comes from nuclear physics ( not sure about dates here - 1900-1940s? ) - however there is a difference between theoretical possibility and can actually be made to happen in the lab - I think that wasn't experimentally shown until the 1970's or 1980s.