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That is gold wire isn’t it? Ok. It is so small you probably won’t
see it.
So gold is an element, one of the few elements that I think
everybody is very familiar with. Women and many men wear
it as a wedding ring. I don’t wear a wedding ring because as a
chemist I am frightened that it will react with mercury and go
silver and colour and therefore no longer look nice.
So here we have a very, very fine sample of Grade 1
research-quality gold. So everybody knows that gold is used
to make rings and lots of jewellery and we do that because it
is inert. It does not react with anything at all.
Gold used to be, recently, used quite a lot for filling
people’s teeth or false teeth because it is chemically very un-
reactive. And gold, like silver, is an element which is found
naturally, in rocks and so on, actually as metallic gold. In fact
unlike a lot of the other elements it is largely found as
metallic gold. This is why people pan for gold and so on
because they fall - the heavy pieces fall to the ground.
So you can very happily wear it for hundreds of years and it
will not oxidise or tarnish.
Gold is very dense, so if this was made of gold, I could not
just lift it up because it would be just too heavy and the
mines that make platinum and the other noble metals also
get quite a large amount of gold at the same time because
gold occurs naturally with a greater abundance than these
other metals.
Gold obviously is also a storage of wealth because of the fact
that it is so inert, in terms of value, I think this gold is
perhaps maybe about 10 pence. It is probably more
expensive than that actually because this is Grade 1.
Recently chemists have realised that gold although it is
chemically rather un-reactive, can form quite good catalysts
and so that there is a lot of research going on at the moment
to try and see what gold can and cannot do. Because as it is
much more abundant than other heavy metals there is quite
enough gold to make all the catalysts we could possibly want.
There is 1.17 grams when it is full. I think there is probably
about 50mg. Ok, let’s pop that back in.
The alchemist idea of making gold from lead and so on is
completely mad, it is not physically possible. However in
modern times when people made/got nuclear reactors and
even more when they got so called accelerators where they
can use electric fields to make the nucleus of atoms travel at
enormous speed then they can actually make two atoms ***
together and turn into another one, but this is on a very small
scale, atom by atom, and is it not a way that you could
industrially manufacture. If you want to become rich there are
better ways than trying to make gold.