Nuclear Engineer Reacts to NileRed Making Purple Gold - Part 1

[DanielRichards]

I literally just watched the Purple Gold video last night and said to myself, "yeah Tyler's gonna react to this one for sure".

[BrightBlueJim]

There's a story Nile Red's destruction and recovery of his gold reminds me of: Alfred Maddock was working on alloys to be used in construction of atomic weapons, and had in his posession for an experiment, the UK's entire stock of plutonium, about 10mg. This he accidentally spilled on a wooden table. To recover the plutonium, he cut out the section of the table that the plutonium had spilled on, burned it, and recovered 9.5mg of it chemically. That's what this reminded me of.

[Mercure]

In French, we use the comma for decimals, and we use spaces for separating groups of three digits (so one million = 1 000 000). Since this gold bar seems to come from Switzerland, and the French part of it as well ("suisse" is the French word for "Swiss", and there's also "essayeur" and "fondeur" which mean "assayer" and "smelter"), it makes sense they would use this convention instead of the English convention (even though it also says "fine gold" in English lol).

By the way, if you didn't know, "aqua regia" means "royal/regal water" in Latin.

[jqbXD]

Gold bars actually tend to come in those annoying little packages. I think they're purposely difficult to open because you're not really supposed to take them out of the container.

[Merennulli]

The comma decimal separator is a European thing. Math notation varies by culture.

[Tax_Collector]

I’m thinking how this could change the trend and demand of purple gold in the following years, will more jewelry companies and jewelers view Nigel’s purple gold experiment as a promising stepping stone for the development of standardized procedures for making purple gold?

[mastershooter]

13:03 The color of the gold nanoparticles and the color of HAuCl4 are due to different reasons. The color of Chloroauric acid is the due to the same reason many transition metal compounds are colored. It's due to the splitting of the d-orbitals of the atom which lets the compound absorb light of visible wavelength (so the color of the compound will be the complementary color).

The color of gold nanoparticles is due to a different but an even more interesting reason! It is apparently due to "Localized surface plasmon resonance" which is the electric field of the incident electromagnetic radiation (visible light) interacting with the conduction electrons near the surface of the gold nanoparticles and making them oscillate coherently. I am unsure about the details of this phenomenon as I just read about it and I'm only doing chapter 4 of griffths EM right now lol

[deskmat]

Imagine being the Lee Hwa guy who bought the patent, just for NileRed to make a video exposing the top secret sauce formula for purple gold, and it gets 4 million views in a single day

[nematrec]

NileRed: I'm going to use the really sophisticated method of going really really fast

Nuclear engineers: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

[NotMiku]

Fun story time, purple gold has been around in the Asia/Arab world for hundreds, maybe thousands of years but it was pretty much considered a myth in the west. When the Beatles went over to India in the 60’s a member of royalty gave a broach to Paul McCartney that had purple gold in it and that was the first piece brought back to the west proving it was real.

[Reneelwaring]

A chemist in Germany during WWII turned his gold into yellow liquid and sat it on a shelf for four years until the end of the war. The SS did come by looking for the gold but never found it. After the war he turned it back into a solid form. So cool!

[seanet]

I am an electrical engineer, i've come accorss the comma as a decimal point once in my professional life thanks to an IEC standard.
Worst part is it had 3 decimal places so at first i didnt pick up on this and we had a completly different outcome from the calculation. Quickly picked up as the number didn't look right.

Thanks parts of Europe.

[rcrawford]

Man, if the ancient world had been able to extract aluminum and knew about this alloy, they'd have been all over this. For most of the Roman Empire, purple dye was restricted to the emperors; even senators were only allowed to have a purple border on their togas.

[dinoeebastian]

I doubt it'll ever happen, but it would be so cool to see a NileRed and T. Folse Nuclear colab

[davidmaisel]

Something I've observed refining gold. Occasionally, when adding sodium metabisulfate (Nile used potassium metabisulfate, but it's essentially the same reaction) I've seen the solution go purple and rarely even get finely divided purple shaded powder but once melted it it turns the classic yellow gold color.
Interesting that aluminum creates purple gold.

[richfiles]

I love the fact that Nile has B-Roll of bending a similar gold bar in a vise by hammering on it... Imagine... Having B-Roll of bending a _different_ gold bar...

[zardzewialy]

You may want to check the "Decimal separator" article on Wikipedia where they have a map of all countries that use dot and comma as decimal separator and comma is actually MORE COMMON.

[Adi-kfbq]

8:55 in germany we do typically use ", " for decimalpoints and we use "." to seperate in to 3 digit blocks infront of the ", ". For example in germany we would write 4.756, 55$ instead of 4, 756.55$. The first time i was a little bit confused for a short time but ever after the first time seeing it i just subcontiously swap them

[Roozyj]

"I wouldn't recommend a nuclear reactor for large scale alchemy" Love it

[seanthiar]

9:20 More countries use the comma than the point as a separator for decimals. Canada use both. Following the international norm IEC/ISO 8000-1 the default separator for decimals is the comma.