Gold or Pyrite? A Dummy Tests

Gold flecks in a bottle 

We aren't certain, but we suspect that there are plenty of posts scattered across the niche sites formerly known as eHow.com attempting to differentiate gold and so-called "fool's gold." What's disappointing about this plenitude is that almost all, if not all, of them were written by people who had no idea what they were talking about. We know we've seen at least one of them before among our DotDs, along with a variety of posts purporting to tell you where and/or how to look for gold. To that number, we now add another nominee, one Chelsea Fitzgerald, who qualified on the basis of her Sciencing.com content, "How to Separate Specks of Fool's Gold From Specks of Real Gold."

Fitzgerald's post simply doesn't get the job done. Instead of useful information, Chelsea repeated utterly bogus factoids such as,

"Test the gold specks and flakes with a magnet. Real gold is not attracted, but fool's gold is..."

We have no idea where multiple eHowians came up with this notion, but the sad fact is that pyrite, regardless of its "high iron content," is not magnetic. Be that as it may, Chelsea had a lot of  problems with this topic, revealing her ignorance in such statements as this instruction for panning: "Repeat the shaking of the pan and the back and forth motions that wash away sediment until nothing is left in the pan except gold nuggets and flakes..." Sure would be nice to find a "nugget" or two every time you pan, eh? And then there's this strange claim about pyrite: "...the mineral pyrite, has a metallic luster and gray or black streaks..." Streaks, plural? huh? or this description of the two minerals:

"Real gold has no angles. Pyrite looks like crystals..."

..."information" that is at best misleading and more accurately, dead wrong. Or how about Fitzgerald's suggestion to,

"Pick out the flecks of gold with tweezers and attempt to break them."

Clearly, Chelsea does not know how small a "fleck" is.

No, those suggestions (and others) might help you differentiate between specimens the size of, say, a pencil  eraser; but not "flecks." In the real world, where gold is about 50% denser than pyrite (and hella denser than mica), you just keep panning. That's what our Dumbass of the Day didn't seem to understand.

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