i know that gold is a soft metal, but is it soft enough to actually swim around in like Scrooge McDuck does?
help.
Not in Earth’s gravity. Diving into a giant container of loose solid gold coins would be tantamount to diving into a gravel road, at least as far as medical consequences go.
i understand that diving wouldnt be possible, but if the gold were in foil shape would you be able to swim in it
But you can toss it up and let it land on your head.
I really don’t understand the question. You will be able to stand on it. How do you propose to swim in it? Gold is a solid. How do you swim in a solid? A lot of gold is going to scrunch up into a solid block under its own weight, and for all intents and purposes you will not sink in a vault of gold even if it’s in foil form if it’s really mostly gold. I don’t think there is a ratio of air to gold that gives a medium that doesn’t collapse into a gold brick and at the same time provides any sort of buoyancy to faciliate swimming at standard temperature.
So this all ends at how loosely you define swimming. Is crawling on top of a solid surface swimming? Is ice skating swimming? Is walking through air the same as swimming through air? Because a vault of gold foil is going to be solid gold and air in various arrangements and proportions. Most arrangements that will allow you to “sink” into the gold will result in the gold below you being permanently deformed so you’d just sink and not attain any sort of buoyancy.
I think the OP means gold coins or bullion. Actually, if you go by the cartoons, the money bin is filled with currency and coins of various denominations. You probably couldn’t swim through it, but I bet you could tunnel through it, kind of like a mole, with a great deal of effort.
I don’t know whether you can swim in gallium or liquid mercury or something like that but I would imagine those things being significantly more dense than water when liquid would be difficult to either walk on or swim in. Sounds like dangerous fun actually.
All of my childhood fantasies destroyed in one thread…
I’ve seen a picture of someone sitting on the surface of a vat of liquid mercury. It would seem that swimming through it is out.
No I understood that much, but mind you, a cubic meter of gold weighs nearly 20 tons. Even if you allow that with coinage and paper currancy it’s 75% hollow air, that’s still 5 tons of metal per cubic meter, and with small sizes of coins filling any cavities you will have trouble breathing when you tunnel. As you get below a foot or two density of it is going to be approaching ‘mostly solid’ mix of gold coins and currency, which would prevent you from inhaling even pressurized air. Do you really want to be using your chest to displace tons and tons of metal?
No, but you wouldn’t be able to dig yourself down that far anyway.
I suppose you could make hollow gold spheres - their overall density would be light enough for you to shove you way through them. Plus if you got bored with swimming, you could play the world’s most expensive game of ping pong.
About 10 years ago, illustrator Don Rosa, the only worthy heir of Carl Barks in drawing Scrooge McDuck adventures, did a monumental series called “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck”. I believe it was in 10 or twelve issues. And in one of them, he showed that Scrooge McDuck learned this talent to dive in and out of money like a flying fish when he was escaping from bandits in Mongolia. And yes, it does defy a number of logical and physical concepts.
But I respectfully submit that ducks that talk and walk around with prehensile hands, wearing clothes on their upper body (but for some reason not on their lower body) are not exactly existing in the same universae as you and I.
It is a little like the three stooges. They obviously inhabit a universe where different laws of physics apply.
An illustration will suffice:
Given that the top of a human head is about one quarter of a square foot in area, if a hammer flies into the air in a room that is 100 square feet in area, the chances of the hammer hitting the top of Moe’s head would normally be one in 400.
But how likely is the hammer to hit Moe on the head in the film. About 100%!
Obviously, these beings live in parallel universes that are similar to ours but have some very marked differences in their physical laws.
Actually Moe is around falling hammers a lot and he only gets hit about one in four hundred times. It’s just that they only bother showing you the footage when he gets hit.
See: Who’s richer, Bill Gates or Scrooge McDuck?
In one of the earliest comics, “Only a Poor Old Man,” the Beagle Boys (the terrible Beagle Boys!) manage to steal all of Scrooge’s money. Scrooge, weeping, asks if he can burrow through it like a gopher, and dive in it like a porpoise, and toss some of it up in the air and let it fall back on his head, one last time. He does so; the Beagle Boys say, “Hey, that looks like fun!” and they try to dive into the money. They crack their heads like they hit a wall, and are knocked unconscious, allowing the ducks to recover the money. When Donald and nephews ask Scrooge how he manages to dive through the money without knocking himself out, he winks and says, “Well, I’ll tell you… it’s a trick.”
—Hijack
Pretty likely given Moe’s brain was constructed of Neodymium-Iron-Boron magnets
—End Hijack
Surely Shirley you jest.
Pull the othe one…
Its in an edition of National Geographic…don’t know the month or year though.
A recent issue of The Simpson’s comic shows something very similar, with Simpsons characters injuring themselves when they try to “swim” through money. It was an issue devoted to Carl Barks parodies.
From this site: (scroll down a bit, pic is there)