Gold-making

The chemical and physical properties of gold make it highly suitable for exploitation in diverse types of nanotechnologies. In particular, gold surfaces provide a convenient... 

Merkur, Daniel. The study of spiritual alchemy mysticism, gold-making and hermeneutics. Ambix 37, no. 1 (Mar 1990) 35-45. 

Since ruthenium is rare and difEcult to isolate in pure form, there are few uses for it. Its main uses are as an alloy to produce noncorrosive steel and as an additive to jewelry metals such as platinum, palladium, and gold, making them more durable. 

Jewish and Islamic scholars were invited to the court of Frederick II in Sicily, and the Knights of St. John opened communication with the East on the island of Rhodes. Due to this influx, Sicily, Spain, and southern France rapidly became multicultural communities. In these areas Jewish and other scholars began to translate Arabic and Greek texts into Latin, which made them available to the rest of Europe. One of the first of these texts was the Book of the Composition of Alchemy, translated into Latin by the Englishman Robert of Chester in 1144. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the art of gold-making was integrated into Western mystical philosophy. 

From the statement of the thirteenth century encyclopedists, and from Arabian writers also, we know that there existed much imposture and charlatanry among writers on alchemy, with their assumptions and claims as to gold making and the elixir of life. Concerning the dates or authorship of such alchemical writings we rarely have specific or definite information. Works of this character were not generally issued except under precautions to conceal the identity of the writer. 

He possessed a breadth of view as to the field of chemistry and its possibilities and stimulated chemists to seek a more important field for their activities than the search for gold making or the philosopher s stone. Not that he disbelieved in the possibility or reality of transmutation. On the contrary it received full attention and credence from him in his chemical philosophy. His estimate of the place of... 

A second theory is that chemistry comes from the Greek "cheo", which means, "I cast", or "I pour", and refers to the metallurgical operations of early chemists. Yet another suggestion is that chemistry is derived from the Chinese "chin-i", pronounced "kim ya", which means "gold making juice". 

The fact that self-assembly of thiols on gold makes it possible to create well-defined surfaces with controlled properties was used extensively to understand the forces controlling orientation of liquid crystals adsorbed at surfaces545 - 549. 

Heavy metals, especially the third row transition elements, are useful reagents in biology and biochemistry. The high electron density of these elements (notably tungsten, osmium, platiniim and gold) makes them well suited for revealing aspects of supramolecular structures in electron microscopic images (l). More recently, simple platinum complexes have become widely used in cancer chemotherapy ( ). 

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