A company says it could turn mercury into gold using nuclear fusion. Can we take this claim seriously?

By Adrian Bevan, Professor of Physics, School of Physical and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London

The alchemist’s dream is to make gold from common metals, but can this be done? The physics needed to explain how to change one element into another is well understood and has been used for decades in accelerators and colliders, which smash sub-atomic particles together.

The most notable present-day example is the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, based in Geneva. But the costs of making gold this way are vast, and the quantities generated are minuscule.

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