Tim wrote:
...gold can be melted and all traces of origin lost, save for some expensive tinkering with isotopic ratios, maybe.
Gold, last I looked, had a single stable isotope which accounted for 100% of its natural abundance. 79-Au-197. One piece of pure stable gold is indistinguishable from another. So if your gold is pure and isn't radioactive, it hasn't been tagged by isotopic ratio tweeks. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
Though as a matter of off-topic actual fact, no gold (maybe outside a few labs that are trying hard) is likely to be pure enough not to be traceable. As far as I know archaeologists & art historians (& I assume police) have been matching gold artefacts to their sources for some time now. Not as easy as copper (or oil - tax people like being able to trace oil to wells) but doable. Doesn't alter Tim's point that you can obscure the origins my mixing gold from different places of course. Not, I imagine, something that anyone actually ever does, but it would obviously work. Googling for "gold isotope provenance" got me 911 hits. Ken Brown Eric Cordian wrote:
Tim wrote:
...gold can be melted and all traces of origin lost, save for some expensive tinkering with isotopic ratios, maybe.
Gold, last I looked, had a single stable isotope which accounted for 100% of its natural abundance. 79-Au-197.
One piece of pure stable gold is indistinguishable from another.
So if your gold is pure and isn't radioactive, it hasn't been tagged by isotopic ratio tweeks.
participants (2)
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Eric Cordian -
Ken Brown