Some of Edward Robert Hughes work are a bit similar to some of nowadays "AI" art. I wonder if some of his work and the pre-Raphaelite works affected these generators #LLM #Art

By "thoughts on gold" I don't mean I'm sitting here thinking about a golden prefrontal cortex (which might also be the case), I just want to write down some non-economical thoughts about it. I never get to talk about gold, and I don't want to sound cliché when I do. Gold gets ruined by obvious sentences. Everyone says it's beautiful. Everyone says it's valuable. Everyone says the pharaohs loved it and the empires killed for it and the temples were drowned in it, and all of that is true, and none of it is the part I care about.

What I actually like about gold is that it's unnatural, and by unnatural I mean it doesn't belong to the ordinary boredom of matter. It feels like something God put here on purpose. And every civilization understood this without a committee or a market report or a theory of taste. People who agreed on nothing, not gods, not language, not borders, not food, not what to do with their dead, somehow all agreed on gold. That makes me suspicious in the good way. There are very few things the whole species has loved almost without argument. Gold is one of them.

But the real reason I love it is how it's made, because to make gold the universe has to commit violence on a scale that makes the word "violence" feel small, and when you actually learn how it happens it sounds like a lie.

So let me put it like it was said, it has been said that stars build the elements by crushing small things into bigger things, and the bargain pays off, it gives light and heat, all the way up to iron. Iron is the wall. At iron the books balance to almost nothing, around 8.8 million electron-volts of binding holding every single particle in place, the most stable arrangement matter is allowed to have, and past that line the whole deal reverses. To build anything heavier than iron you have to pour energy in instead of getting it out. So no star, not even a giant one in the middle of dying, can calmly work its way up to gold. The furnace that lit every night sky you have ever seen is forbidden, by physics, from making the thing on your finger. Gold is not born from a star living. Gold is born from a star's death, and not even an ordinary death.

What you need is two corpses. A neutron star is what a giant star leaves behind when it finally collapses, the burnt-out core packed so tightly that protons and electrons are crushed into neutrons, a thing barely 20 kilometres across, but carrying more mass than the Sun. The density is not describable, one teaspoon of it weighs about a billion tonnes. A sugar cube of the stuff outweighs a mountain range. Now take two of these monsters and set them circling each other in the dark. They orbit for hundreds of millions of years, sometimes billions, bleeding their energy into ripples in space, drawing closer the whole time, patient, silent, doomed. And in the final second of those hundreds of millions of years, they stop being slow. They whip around each other hundreds of times a second, faster and faster, until they are tearing through space at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light, and then they hit.

The collision is so enormous it rings spacetime itself like a struck bell. On the seventeenth of August 2017, one of those bell-notes arrived at Earth. It had been travelling for one hundred and thirty million years across the void to reach us, a wave from a wreck older than every human who has ever lived, and our instruments felt the planet stretch and squeeze by less than the width of a proton as it passed straight through the ground, through the room, through us. And in that one impact, in maybe a second or two of pure catastrophe, the universe forged something like several whole Earths' worth of gold and flung it screaming into the dark.

That dark is where a ring came from. Every scrap of gold that exists was hammered out of a disaster older than the Earth itself, and then as cooling dust through empty space for unimaginable stretches of time, then got swept up into the cloud that collapsed into our Sun, our planet, and eventually us. I think about that every time I hold a piece of it, or see it on someone I know. The gold on your hand is older than your hand, older than the ground under your feet, older than the world. You can say that about most matter, since all of it is ancient. But gold is one of the very few things that survives those four and a half billion years still wearing its purest face that still keeping the exact form it was born with.

I don't love gold because it's expensive, in fact the price bores me. I love looking at it because the colour is honestly its own colour. And I'd love to be given it, and I'd love to give it to someone, not for what it costs but for what it is. I love the idea of handing a person a piece of a dead star that crossed the entire universe and survived a hundred and thirty million years of empty space just to end up sitting quietly between two people. Everything else about gold is just the receipt. #Science