

Jokes aside, that’s actually beyond amazing for the future. They’re documenting photon to photon and photon to nucleus interaction from near-misses, that can eject a small number of neutrons and protons. And they create gold from lead on lead nucleus near misses for a split second.
Although I can already see the pop-science headlines about how they’ve discovered “Matter conversion” and they’ll be “printing gold”. And then buried at the bottom of the article there’s some line about how it would take two centuries or so to reach that point.
It started as showing off how new something was, and sometimes brand and/or price. And it turned into a fashion statement. Caps are probably the most famous for leaning into the trend and having giant gold and silver stickers covering the top of the visor.
Obligatory Key & Peele sketch