Over the last couple of days, while reading the end of Revelations, I was intrigued by the idea of transparent gold. In Rev 21, verses 18 and 21 both make reference: and the city was pure gold, like clear glass; And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass.
Can gold be so refined that it would be transparent? An internet search shows that it can be beaten so thinly it becomes transparent.
www.chestjournal.org/cgi/reprint/60/2/174.pdf (excerpt)
Transparent Gold
Gold is extremely soft and in its reasonably pure state
it is extraordinarily malleable. A troy ounce (480 grains)
can be beaten out, by methods inherited from medieval
goldsmiths and carefully improved, into a thin film
which would cover 100 square feet-so thin in fact, that
it could be less than 1/282000-th of an inch, and show
light through it: indeed, it has been recorded that a
single grain of gold has been beaten to a thinness of
1/360000-th of an inch-over a thousand times thinner
than normal paper-so as to cover an area of 75 square
inches. One grain of gold may be drawn into a fine wire
600 feet long and one ounce into a length of no less than
50 miles, while, if gold thread is required for gold lace
or gold tissue (from which tissue paper, originally
designed for placing between folds of gold-woven fabric,
gets its name), an ounce of gold very thinly plated, in
leaf form, upon a silver or copper wire base will suffice
for over 1000 miles.
Sutherland, C H V: Gold: Its Beauty,
Power and Allure, New York, McGraw
-Hill (2-nd revised ed), 1969
This information is current as of December 31, 2007
So what do you think the streets of heaven be like?
Can gold be so refined that it would be transparent? An internet search shows that it can be beaten so thinly it becomes transparent.
www.chestjournal.org/cgi/reprint/60/2/174.pdf (excerpt)
Transparent Gold
Gold is extremely soft and in its reasonably pure state
it is extraordinarily malleable. A troy ounce (480 grains)
can be beaten out, by methods inherited from medieval
goldsmiths and carefully improved, into a thin film
which would cover 100 square feet-so thin in fact, that
it could be less than 1/282000-th of an inch, and show
light through it: indeed, it has been recorded that a
single grain of gold has been beaten to a thinness of
1/360000-th of an inch-over a thousand times thinner
than normal paper-so as to cover an area of 75 square
inches. One grain of gold may be drawn into a fine wire
600 feet long and one ounce into a length of no less than
50 miles, while, if gold thread is required for gold lace
or gold tissue (from which tissue paper, originally
designed for placing between folds of gold-woven fabric,
gets its name), an ounce of gold very thinly plated, in
leaf form, upon a silver or copper wire base will suffice
for over 1000 miles.
Sutherland, C H V: Gold: Its Beauty,
Power and Allure, New York, McGraw
-Hill (2-nd revised ed), 1969
This information is current as of December 31, 2007
So what do you think the streets of heaven be like?
