![]() So Sanat says it's not the best choice.Įarly civilizations couldn't have used rhodium or palladium, because they weren't discovered until the early 1800s. Silver has been widely used as money, of course. And all of them, as it happens, are considered precious metals.īut even here we can cross things out. That leaves us with just five elements: rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold. So osmium - which apparently comes to earth via meteorites - gets the axe. This lets him cross off a lot of the boxes near the top of the table, because the elements clustered there tend to be more abundant.Īt the same time, you don't want to pick an element that's too rare. Now Sanat adds a new requirement: You want the thing you pick to be rare. So we're down from 118 elements to 30, and we've come up with a list of three key requirements: They're always broken out separately from the main table, and they have some great names - promethium, einsteinium.īut it turns out they're radioactive - put some einsteinium in your pocket, and a year later, you'll be dead. Then we ask him about those two weird rows at the bottom of the table. So Sanat crosses out another 38 elements, because they're too reactive. But sometimes they corrode, start to fall apart. And it turns out that a lot of the elements in the periodic table are pretty reactive. In fact, you don't want your money undergoing any kind of spontaneous chemical reactions. Money that spontaneously bursts into flames is clearly a bad idea. "If you expose lithium to air, it will cause a huge fire that can burn through concrete walls," he says. Then he swings over to the far left-hand column, and points to one of the elements there: Lithium So Sanat crosses out the right-hand column. You could put all your gaseous money in a jar, but if you opened the jar, you'd be broke. They're chemically stable.īut there's also a big drawback: They're gases. The elements there have a really appealing characteristic: They're not going to change. Sanat starts with the far-right column of the table. Each square has a different element in it - one for carbon, another for gold, and so on. The periodic table looks kind of like a bingo card. We asked him to take the periodic table, and start eliminating anything that wouldn't work as money. We went to an expert to find out: Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University. Why gold? Why not osmium, lithium, or ruthenium? Gold has been used as money for millennia, and its price has been going through the roof. And yet, for thousands of years, humans have really, really liked one of them in particular: gold. The periodic table lists 118 different chemical elements.
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