Raw Gold for Dummies

You might have mentioned how small the flakes are, Philippa

When the price of gold starts climbing, which tends to happen every few years, all sorts of would-be prospectors come out of the woodwork. Most of them start their search for the precious metal on the internet, googling such questions as "where can I find gold without having to work very hard?" When they can't find an answer to that question, they drill down (pun intended) on individual questions. If they're smart, when they ask "How to Identify Raw Gold," they will skip over the Sciencing.com post of that title written by newcomer Philippa Jones.

Jones drew heavily on her polysci BA and her background as a music journalist to address the query.. Well, no, she didn't. Instead, she blathered on for more than 500 words; almost entirely in an attempt to help people differentiate between "fool's gold" and the real stuff. Along the way she concocted some pretty doofus claims. Following are a few of Philippa's more... interesting statements:

1. "...real gold... though soft, does not fall apart when you touch it like fool's gold can."
2. "When panning, raw gold weighs the heaviest and is found in the rifles [sic] or along the bottom edge of the pan."
3. "Flakes of fool's gold – iron pyrite – break apart easily when you thrust a fingernail through it [sic] in the gold pan."
4. "To make specimen [sic] for museums from veins of gold in quartz, professionals melt the quartz in an acid bath, leaving just enough of the quartz as a base for the threadlike filigree-appearing gold."
5. "Other non-gold metals or minerals can break when hammer [sic]."

We asked our geologist about what Jones had said, and she suggested that Philippa must have translated it all, badly, from Russian¹. Here's what she said, in more detail:

Though Jones only mentions pyrite as "fool's gold," this reads as though she's differentiating mica flakes from flakes of gold. It's pretty likely she means "riffles." Riffles are depressions in the side of some pans or raised ridges in sluice boxes; in a sluice the heavies are concentrated on the lee side of a riffle. Rifles, on the other hand, aren't found in gold pans... Bad grammar notwithstanding, it's absolutely ridiculous to claim that pyrite is that brittle. Maybe she's talking about mica again? I have no idea what this is supposed to mean... The only other native metals are copper and silver, or very rarely platinum, none of which will "break when hammer."

Jones says almost nothing about the physical properties of native gold other than that it is "a soft, malleable metal that bends easily" – strange, we thought "malleable" means "bends easily"... oops: it does! Almost all her "clues" are related to the metal's color as opposed to its density or hardness, except perhaps for her rather confused suggestion that readers "Place the substance in corrosive nitric acid" – yeah, like you can find  nitric acid that isn't corrosive...

As is typical of the scientifically illiterate, Jones pretty much wastes the time of anyone unlucky enough to come across this dreck. Go Philippa! and take your Dumbass of the Day award with you!

¹ The reality is that Jones found a commercial post by someone with even poorer skills than hers and shamelessly copied crap from it...

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