Gold is a very soft metal, it can easily be dented, which is why people in the old wild west bit nuggets. If their teeth left a dent in the nugget, it was (mostly) gold. It's also the reason why jewelry is never made from pure gold (24 K) but always from alloys.
Gold can also be rolled into very thin foils. It's one of very few materials that can be flattened into layers of less than 1000 atoms by using only mechanical processes. These gold foils are transparent.
|