For centuries, the idea of turning lead into gold was dismissed as fantasy — the delusion of mystics and medieval dreamers. Alchemy , stripped of its symbolism, was caricatured as a failed precursor to chemistry. And yet, in 2025, modern physics quietly confirmed something extraordinary: Under extreme conditions, lead can, in fact, become gold. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally. At CERN ’s Large Hadron Collider , scientists observed lead nuclei shedding protons du