Episode Details

NB My next Best In Class, in which I identify the go-to stocks in the natural resources sector, is out tomorrow. Keep an eye out for that. (Only for paid subscribers).

Today, though, gold …

I am going to the Edinburgh Fringe this August to do one of my lectures with funny bits. This one is about gold - its history, its fascination, its future. It really is the most amazing metal, not least because it is, as Spandau Ballet famously sung, indestructible. Life may be temporary, but gold is permanent. 

No other substance is as durable, not diamonds, not tungsten carbide, not boron nitride. 

You can shape this enormously ductile metal into pretty much anything. An ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire fifty miles long. You can beat it into a leaf just one atom thick. Yet there is one thing you cannot do and that is destroy it. 

You can change its form by dissolving it in certain chemical solutions or alloying it with other metals. You can even vaporise it. But the gold will always be there. It is theoretically possible to destroy gold through extreme methods such as nuclear reactions, but in practical terms, gold is indestructible. That makes it unique among natural substances: the closest thing we have on Earth to immortality. Perhaps that is why practically every ancient culture we know of associated gold with the gods, why the Egyptians believed it had magical powers that gave you safe passage into the afterlife. 

In a museum in Cairo you will find a golden tooth bridge made for a well-to-do Egyptian 4,500 years ago. It is good enough to go in someone’s mouth today, (though I would give it a good scrub first). In 2021 a metal detectorist by the name of Ole Ginnerup Schytz unearthed a Viking gold hoard in a field near Jelling in Denmark. The gold was just as it was when it was buried 1500 years earlier, if a little dirtier. Gold does not corrode, it does not tarnish, it does not break down over time. 

All the gold that has ever been mined, save the tiny amounts dissolved in aqua regia (nitrohydrochloric acid), still exists in the world in one form or another. Some may have been lost, but none of it has been destroyed. What’s more, it will always exist. Even tiny specks of gold dust are permanent.

Park that thought for a moment, as we consider how gold came into existence. No one really knows the answer to that.

Divine creation is one widely held theory. Another is that gold’s origins lie in supernovae and the collision of neutron stars. 

Scientists think they actually witnessed gold being created in August 2017. Some 130 million light-years away, two neutron stars, each as small as a city but heavier than the sun, collided. The collision caused a colossal convulsion known as a kilonova. An enormous amount of energy was then released in the form of gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, which was observed by telescopes around the world as it rippled through space and time to Earth. 

Astronomers were able to measure the amount of heavy elements produced by the collision, because of the multiple wavelengths and bright opt