Only Gold Can Stay

Frost family grave, photo by Richard Avery

Originally posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2014

Robert Frost famously wrote a rather melancholy poem, Nothing Gold Can Stay:

“Nature’s first green is gold, The hardest hue to hold.”

Now science, reports Gizmag, has developed a process called “ion beam milling” to turn the metal gold to any color.

Such as green.  Gold now can be green.

[S]cientists from the University of Southampton have now devised a technique that causes gold (or other metals) to be seen in a variety of other colors … green gold, anyone?

Unlike processes such as anodizing, in which colored films are added to metal surfaces, the Southampton technology works by actually altering the gold itself. Tiny raised or indented patterns are embossed onto its surface, changing the way that it absorbs and reflects light. Depending on the shape, height and/or depth of the pattern, that reflected light can be seen as any one of a number of colors. Different patterns could even be applied to the same object, causing different parts of it to take on different colors.

Ion beam milling reportedly can change the perceived color of other metals as well.

It could, in principle, turn lead the color gold.

But, whatever the color with which metals can be imbued, that’s just an optical effect.  Gold is an element, its atomic structure unchangeable (which is why alchemists were never able to transmute base metals into it.)  As Lewis E. Lehrman, founder and chairman of the Lehrman Institute, wrote in the October 2012 issue of The American Spectator, A Road to Prosperity,

“Gold, by its intrinsic nature, is durable, homogenous, fungible, imperishable, indestructible, and malleable. It has a relatively low melting point, facilitating coined money.”

That article memorably commences:

Gold, a fundamental, metallic element of the earth’s constitution, exhibits unique properties that enabled it, during two millennia of market testing, to emerge as a universally accepted store of value and medium of exchange, not least because it could sustain purchasing power over the long run against a standard assortment of goods and services. Rarely considered in monetary debates, these natural properties of gold caused it to prevail as a stable monetary standard, the most marketable means by which trading peoples worldwide could make trustworthy direct and indirect exchanges for all other articles of wealth.

The preference of tribal cultures, as well as ancient and modern civilizations, to use gold as money was no mere accident of history. Nor has this natural, historical, and global preference for gold as a store of value and standard of measure been easily purged by academic theory and government fiat.

History teaches us, pace Robert Frost, in fact, only gold can stay.