Gold as a Metal

Gold is the most malleable of all metals: it can be beaten into thinner sheets than any other metal.
- Gold can be beaten without any special difficulty to a thickness of 0.1 micron (0.1 μm).
- A stack of 1000 sheets of 0.1 micron gold leaf is the same thickness as a typical piece of printer paper.
Gold is the most ductile of all metals: it is the most suitable for drawing into wires.
- One ounce (28.35 g) of gold can be drawn into a wire 1250 miles (2012 km) long (thickness 1 micron, 1 μm).
  - This means that you could make a gold wire long enough to go around the earth with just 20 ounces (565 g) of gold.
Using metric units, 1 gram of gold could be drawn to a length of 66 km.

Gold as an Element

Gold is one of the densest elements.
- A cube of gold with each side just 14.2 inches long would weigh a ton. (37.27 cm sides give a metric ton.)
- There are only six metals denser than gold are: osmium, iridium, platinum, rhenium, neptunium and plutonium.
‘The acid test: a test whose result is absolutely certain.
- The first acid test was a drop of nitric acid on metal.
- Gold does NOT dissolve in nitric acid, so if a metal reacts with nitric acid, it is certainly NOT gold.
- The ‘acid test’ became popular in the 1849 Californian gold rush, when all sorts of characters tried their hand at selling fake gold.

The total mass of gold ever extracted from Earth is 170 000 metric tons (at the beginning of 2012).
This amount of gold would fill three and a half Olympic swimming pools.
About 2500 metric tons of gold is now mined every year.
Two-thirds of all the gold ever taken from the earth has been taken since 1950.
Approximately 75 percent of the world’s gold ends up in jewelry.

Ernest Rutherford and his coworkers Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden fired alpha particles (nuclei of helium) at gold leaf.
The experiment found that alpha particles were deflected as they passed through the gold more than they ought to have been if the gold atoms were made of smoothly spread matter.
By 1911 Rutherford had concluded that atoms consist of a tiny, dense point of positive charge surrounded mostly by empty space in which negatively charged electrons are present.

Gold is the most malleable of all metals: it can be beaten into thinner sheets than any other metal.
- Gold can be beaten without any special difficulty to a thickness of 0.1 micron (0.1 μm).
- A stack of 1000 sheets of 0.1 micron gold leaf is the same thickness as a typical piece of printer paper.
Gold is the most ductile of all metals: it is the most suitable for drawing into wires.
- One ounce (28.35 g) of gold can be drawn into a wire 1250 miles (2012 km) long (thickness 1 micron, 1 μm).
  - This means that you could make a gold wire long enough to go around the earth with just 20 ounces (565 g) of gold.
Using metric units, 1 gram of gold could be drawn to a length of 66 km.

Gold is one of the densest elements.
- A cube of gold with each side just 14.2 inches long would weigh a ton. (37.27 cm sides give a metric ton.)
- There are only six metals denser than gold are: osmium, iridium, platinum, rhenium, neptunium and plutonium.
‘The acid test: a test whose result is absolutely certain.
- The first acid test was a drop of nitric acid on metal.
- Gold does NOT dissolve in nitric acid, so if a metal reacts with nitric acid, it is certainly NOT gold.
- The ‘acid test’ became popular in the 1849 Californian gold rush, when all sorts of characters tried their hand at selling fake gold.

The total mass of gold ever extracted from Earth is 170 000 metric tons (at the beginning of 2012).
This amount of gold would fill three and a half Olympic swimming pools.
About 2500 metric tons of gold is now mined every year.
Two-thirds of all the gold ever taken from the earth has been taken since 1950.
Approximately 75 percent of the world’s gold ends up in jewelry.

Ernest Rutherford and his coworkers Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden fired alpha particles (nuclei of helium) at gold leaf.
The experiment found that alpha particles were deflected as they passed through the gold more than they ought to have been if the gold atoms were made of smoothly spread matter.
By 1911 Rutherford had concluded that atoms consist of a tiny, dense point of positive charge surrounded mostly by empty space in which negatively charged electrons are present.