This was today's Straight Dope. It was pretty unsurprising up until the part about David Hahn, who I've honestly never heard of before (though I have seen the CSI: NY episode that is loosely based on his story -- just never knew it had a grain of truth to it before) http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3067/can-we-now-transmute-base-substances-into-gold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn So remember boys and girls, leave Alchemy to the professionals.
Do not forget the essential tin-foil hat. http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/its-time-for-another-physics-thread.4818/#post-56881
Even if you could manage to transmute some stable, non-radioactive gold, wouldn't such a process eventually cause inflation and therefore devalue it as a resource?
Given gold's excellent properties as a superconductor and potential applications in computer technology, it's unlikely.
Why would anyone be dumb enough to create that much gold at one point in time? sell by degrees, keep prices high.
Gold would be destructive to sensitive electronics if radioactive. (Or at least disruptive.) And if it is not stable for no-less than the products lifetime, it may as well be lead.
This would actually have little bearing on the price of gold, which is not rational at all and is in fact largely simply based on it being hard to obtain. Even if it was the main thing, flooding the market with vast amounts of gold would still collapse the price as supply outstrips demand.
If Fort Knox was emptied in a day, the price of gold would be little higher than lead. If on the other hand, gold were even more scarce for an extended period, it would jump in price to something crazy. The fact is that gold is useful for *Many* things in technology. But it is also hoarded by greedy slobs who think it looks good and thus makes them look good. Not to mention the wackos that keep bullion in the basement for some doomsday event where they think they can buy a better situation with it, since most doomsday situations imply that currency will be worthless except if you need to blow your nose. All that said, Kaidelong is right on this.
However in a real doomsday situation gold won't have much value, other than as a malleable metal to make bullets out of.
Depends upon the doomsday situation. Gold would be more valuable than every munition you could put in a bunker if you had some after an airburst nuclear detonation destroyed *ALL* electronics for hundreds of miles around the ICBM's airburst location. People talk about building a "Faraday Cage" around electronics to protect them. But they could have the electronics buried a mile deep in the Earth and in multiple Faraday Cages and it would amount to nothing. So much energy is released upon airburst detonations that there is literally nothing that can be done. Wires of copper would no longer carry electricity in a reliable means until melted and remade. In such a doomsday, nothing could match the value of gold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage
http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/its-time-for-another-physics-thread.4818/ I started this thread because of the post above. Back to Alchemy for this thread.
I beg to differ. We can already create artificial diamond for industrial purposes. They haven't gotten substantially cheaper last I checked. I'm not saying gold prices wouldn't fall, because they would. I just don't think the methods outlined in that article, or any other possible synthetic production methods, are likely to make gold prices drop to the point where it's common place. There are simply too many potential uses for it that haven't been explored yet on top of its use as a convenient trade good to make the price collapse. A 10% price drop, at the outside. Plus, that kind of manufacturing sounds like it would be very expensive to begin with, so the gold would still sell high for a while just so you could recoup you manufacturing costs and prices would adjust as innovators found new uses for the gold supply and so progress would grind on and the "real" value of gold would probably remain about constant. Mercury, on the other hand, would probably enjoy a spike in value, as it's a limited resource to start with and the required isotope is rare.
The problem with your example of artificial diamonds is that industrial diamonds and diamonds for Jewelry do not necessarily overlap in their supply. It's not like, for example, ethanol, where the same corn could be used for dual purposes. Industrial diamonds tend to be smaller, quality is less essential, and so on. A better example MIGHT be synthetic cubic zirconia, since they are used for gem-quality purposes. The problem with that is that diamonds and cubic zirconia CAN be indistinguishable by the naked eye, but x-ray spectroscopy and other tests can be used to tell the difference and there is a certain amount of status in having genuine diamonds over zirconium. That I haven't the faintest idea of whether or not synthetic Cubic Zirconia affected the price of diamonds when they first appeared on the market. True, they were not marketed OFFICIALLY as true diamonds, but there have always been scams around where diamonds were swapped out by jewelers for cubic zirconia when the jewelry was brought in for an appraisal. (I had a professor in college who was often called in on gem fraud cases by law enforcement so I heard lots of stories from the guy).
Yeah, more than half the diamonds made are little more than sand sized and terribly flawed. The larger ones that are relatively intact can be used for other *INDUSTRIAL* purposes, but artificial Diamonds are *NOT* jewelry diamonds. Real diamonds are usually mined by slaves or workers that are really slaves. A woman I knew a decade ago was upset with her husband because he would not buy her any jewelry with diamonds in it. She threw a fit until he explained that "No wife of mine is going to wear the blood of slaves as jewelry." They had to talk for a long time before she understood his objections. She did not agree, but they did love one-another, and quirks like that come with the territory of marriage. He showered her with gifts he had no moral concern over and they are still together. Happily.
Before I was an Engineering major, I was a Geophysics major. It turned out I didn't love geology or geophysics, but I did enjoy the one mineralogy class I took (from the guy I mentioned in the above post). Our exams largely consisted of going into the lab and having to identify 50 or 100 different gems using scratch and hardness tests, hydrochloric acid, and even taste (gad, if I never taste sylvite again, it will be too soon). In any case, after taking that class, although I eventually changed majors, I did at least gain an appreciation for gems and minerals. I remember after that, going to the Museum of Natural History in New York, and wanting to spend all my time among the mineral and gem exhibits. I probably don't remember much of anything from the classes themselves, but now, I do admire looking at them.
I used to collect crystals and mineral for a while, in my pre-teens. Mostly quarts and amethyst, but I also had a pyrite crystal, and a bunch of neat mineral rocks. I mostly gave it up as I entered my teens but I think I still have a small base of amethyst which I had intended to have turned into a necklace to give some undefined future love interest. It's about an inch in diameter, oval, and has a bunch of small amethyst crystals clustered together on one side. (Something like this: http://imgur.com/4j4Ru). I knew a guy who collected and polished crystals as a hobby, and the two of us even went to a nearby mountain and chiseled out quarts crystals, and he put them in an acid bath to clean them. He discarded the flawed ones, but I remember not being as picky. I think I still have my chisels.
I've had Amethyst geodes and stuff like that as well (also had a small collection that I eventually gave up) that included fossils either that my grandfather or I had picked up on camping trips, or that I found on geology field trips in college. I had a couple of pieces of gypsum with some nice crystal faces, some large fossilized shellfish (included one with the foot actually fossilized and pretty intact -- from a volcanic mudslide). Even something that I at first suspected was a coprolite (fossilized dung, essentially), but TA for the class blasted my hopeful expectations and told me it was more likely a concretion (just a sedimentary rock formation). But I loved the geology lab in college, because it was just FILLED with drawers of all sorts of rocks and minerals (a few of which had been added and labeled by some student jokesters (eg. "Cookieite, location found: Page house kitchen" -- literally a chocolate chip cookie that somehow was as hard as a rock).
