Trivia Junction

A Compendium of trivia I find interesting
...for the curious

IgNobel Transmutation

The 1993 Ig Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Louis Kervran, a French chemist who published a 1966 paper contending that unborn chickens practice transmutation and that eggshells are the result of cold fusion.

Transmutation is the notion that one element can be converted into another, lead to gold, for example. It's the stuff of alchemy, which has never really worked out very well.

But Kervran wrote in his paper that unborn chickens routinely transmute atoms of one kind into another through fusion (combining) and fission (dividing). That's how eggshells are made, he said, by transmuting potassium into calcium.

It bothered Kervran naught that physicists have never actually seen nuclear fusion or nuclear fission in living organisms. Indeed, he wasn't even bothered enough to describe the process himself.

His explanation: It was too simple to be put into words.

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