It costs 70 MILLION dollars per kg! But why?

okay so that beauty there is one kilo of solid silver which is actually fairly expensive but it doesn't cost seventy million dollars per kilo but I'll tell you what does okay so let me start by putting this into perspective this is a one liter pop bottle and pop is mostly water and water it about one kilo per liter so this should weigh about a kilo and the weighs about the kilo so that's what one liter of water looks like that is one kilo of silver obviously a kilo of silver is a lot smaller than a kilo of water and that's because it's all bent facts about ten times denser than water now let me just put the value of one kilo of silver in the perspective a kilo of silver costs about $500 and a new iPhone new iPhone but if imagine it were for the sake of argument the new iPhone also costs about the same but an iphone or modern smartphone weighs you one 200 grams so in terms of value they're approximately the same but of course this weighs about one-fifth one tenth of the weight of the silver so in terms of value per unit mass as smartphone is about ten times more valuable than silver incidentally that's what one kilo copper looks like so if we turn this on we will get kilos copper is a bit on the heavy side the killer solver so you might be wondering why I've actually got these and you may recall that this one do you think that if you lick metal on a really cold Bay we'll stick to it and that's because the metal is a better conductor of heat that you were tongue it and these are some of the best thermal conductors that you can get in fact I think silver is the most thermally conductive element so what I was going to do is freeze these and then use the high-speed camera to film my tongue speaking to one of these vmz a bit random and just you know so you would copper there silver there and that little guy there is is goal let me get a close-up on the goals where so there you go that pure goal and that's only one gram a one gram of gold is about $40 40 50 dollars that sort of thing so hunky ho of silver is worth about the same as ten grams of gold about ten of these guys so gold per kilo would be $40,000 now goals actually quite dense stuff in fact it's incredibly dense stuff it's it's twice as dense as silver here now unfortunately I don't have a kilo of gold so I can't show you what how small a kilo of gold is but I do have some tungsten now tungsten has almost exactly the same density as gold so saw was about 10 grams per cubic centimeter gold or tungsten or about 20 so these actually believe it they weigh about the same so that's one kilo of silver and this is how big one kilo of gold would be in Spain so it's absolutely tiny is one kilo of gold unfortunately I've only got one gram of it but if this were gold that would be worth $40,000 it wouldn't be worth 70 million dollars but I'll show you what is so this is worth 17 million dollars per kilo now obviously I don't have a kilo orbit I've only got about a third of a gram so just for perspective that's my goal that's worth about $50 this is one third of a gram of this mysterious white powder which is worth about $26,000 so what could possibly be worth so much and and it turns out it's potassium 41 chloride now with any element whether it you know be silver copper or whatever there is a nucleus and that nucleus has a certain charge on it which determines the number of electrons it has and that number of electrons determines the chemistry now inside the nucleus you can actually have the same number of positive charges but a different number of neutrons and so the mass of the nucleus can actually vary even though it's the same chemical element musical isotopes now separating ice attach is a mind-blowing ly expensive business so what will probably happened with this is someone started off with regular potassium and then they heated that up in a vacuum and then they fired it down a tube and they put it in a magnetic field and the lighter nuclei Bend more in the in the magnetic field then the heavier ones which don't bend this much to you then you basically scrape off the elements from both of these patches and one of those were doing calcium 41 and so separating isotopes like this is just mind-blowing ly expensive so the place that many people have come across this isotopic enrichment is of course would nuclear bombs onto such like where you've got to separate the two elements of uranium 235 and 238 only 235 is good for reactors and bombs and such like t-38 not too much so why would anyone $26,000 for seven potassium-40 why I mean it's not radioactive it's just a white powder so why would one pay that much money for white powder and the answer is for a science experiment it shows you something the you can't find by any other method so if you watch you want to find it out you've got to collocate you're 41 potassium and the reason the experiment that we're interested in it actually goes down very much to to life and suchlike in that what determines your shape my hand many aspects of it is biochemistry but if I would have died in the middle of the sentence all biochemistry all molecules are exactly where they used to be you wouldn't be able to tell whether like hand was alive or dead what determines alive or dead for us is essentially the neuro chemistry the electrochemistry of our of the body in the neurons and that's determined by the gradient of two wines the sodium iron and the potassium iron now the most common place you come across the sodium iron is in sodium chloride which is salt it's what people put my french fries I'm tatting pick up from a whole variety bub sausage anyway so what happens when you have say for instance the sodium ion in water is the water molecules orient themselves around the iron in a sort of a vibrant a very dynamic hydration Shalit to 3-dimensional structure and obviously it's positively charged iron so the they're relatively positively charged housings mostly point away from it and that a hydration shell is somewhat different between sodium and potassium and of course this is absolutely critical in determining how your nerves function so if you actually want an atomistic understanding of these problems you need to know what the hydration of the potassium ion is and this is a real problem because not only is this a very dynamic hydration shell it's also tiny so these are about angstrom in size which is about one ten-billionth of a meter and this circular hydration shell is only about a nanometer which is a billionth of a meter so how on earth to actually measure something like this it turns out one of the ways you measure the sort of structure of solutions is you fire neutrons through them and but that gives you two complete math it gives you the correlations of everything for everything else and it's a complete nightmare but there's this neat trick that you can do if you can get two isotopes of the same element and that's that you do two identical solutions and use change one of the nuclei yeah so calcium for potassium 41 now the structure of the solution is exactly the same because the structure doesn't depend on the mass but the scattering properties of the solution are different around this nuclei so it enables you to just see what around the nuclei that you've substituted and that's the experiment that we actually did with this potassium 41 so naturally what especially you spent quite a lot of money on on sciency stuff over the years this obviously wasn't one of them not even I am crazy enough to spend twenty six thousand dollars for an experiment like this turns out this was this was actually bought with American money and it is live things that the value of it is basically the the energy cost of making it and there really isn't a market for potassium 41 chloride in the world so in many ways once you've done your experiment you made your measurements there is not much else you can actually do with it so it being satisfied covered for about a year or something so the other day when I actually got around to analyzing some of this data there was some peculiarities to it it's probably that we don't know the properties of the potassium 41 nucleus as well as we thought we did so that's why I actually had to go and get dick out of my cupboard and dry it down which is right this beautiful fine powder at the moment I did this I kid you not on my kitchen table which is now thanks to you know you just been pretty good to me and so my kitchen is now really very well set up science labs so if you made a specifically designed kit you know the glass blow and stuff specifically for drawing this so yeah this is now about to go back to the nuclear reactor along with this which is some very pure regular potassium chloride which has some really bizarre electrostatic properties which over look into some time anyways so bottom line hydration of potassium which want to get into print will be something people will look to for you know the reference it for decades maybe even hundreds of years as a fundamental piece of knowledge that you need to understand how these ions behaving in biological systems have actually measured with this potassium 41 employed here which was purchased with marital money measured in a French nuclear reactor height an Englishman and and and this was actually cleaned up on my kitchen table with scientific kit that would actually purchased with YouTube money cool

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 2,866,409

Rating: 4.4794836 out of 5

Keywords: potassium, million, billion, gold, silver, kg, kilo, kilogram, tungsten, heavy, water, coke, thunderf00t, Philip Mason, bullion, metal

Id: UiDsZ4TZAGs

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2017