Practitioners of alchemy, the medieval and more spiritual predecessor of chemistry, once had a saying: “It is harder to destroy gold than to make it.” Gold — pure gold — is remarkably resilient against fire, acid and rust. In fact, short of launching it into the sun or tossing it into a volcano, leaving the element in a nuclear reactor for a while is your only chance of near-total destruction.
Small wonder, then, that gold has so captured the human imagination. Alchemists from China, India and Europe were for centuries obsessed with the transformation of base metals (particularly lead) into gold. They sought a mythical substance, called the “philosopher’s stone,” to accomplish this task, with no success. Their techniques have long since been relegated to the realm of pseudoscience, alongside many of their assumptions about the world, but the alchemists may have been on to something.
