That garish blob is bismuth? What is the little metal cube to its right?
Pure nonmetals have colors depending on the molecular/crystal form (dark red liquid bromine, yellow sulfur, yellow-green chlorine, violet gaseous iodine) and in the case of cystalline carbon you have both clear diamond and black graphite.
That’s a cube of the metal not grown into “stairstep” crystals. See various forms here:
BTW, there are many places you can find with directions for making bismuth crystals on your stovetop:
I used to work in marketing, arranging to have advertising printed on signs and direct mail. Once a store manager wanted a mailer printed on “gold” paper. He meant metallic gold paper, whereas the printers I spoke to would assume he meant goldenrod-colored paper. (Yellowish-orange.) Metallic gold paper would be really expensive…if it was even do-able.
In Internet HTML, the color named “Silver” is equal amounts of Red, Green, & Blue, each at 75% intensity (Hex C0C0C0). It’s kind of in the grey range.
00).The Color named “Gold” is a yellow, with Red at 1100%, Green at 84%, and no Blue (Hex FFD
If you take your typical “gold” ingot from Fort Knox, the process that occurs is that light strikes the ingot and the ingot absorbs the light. All of it. Except for one wavelength. This wavelength, not being absorbed, is reflected towards our eyes, wherein a whole other process occurs, takes real time and too complicated to go into, for us to finally “think”: “Ah, that’s what I interpret as the colour gold.” Thus the ingot is really all colours, except for one: gold.
Unfortunately, there is no single wavelength that is perceived as gold, which makes this less cute.
In any event, if the ingots at Fort Knox are made of “gold”, rather than gold, perhaps we should alert the authorities? If Auric has switched them out for fakes, I blame Obama.
Osmium is blue-ish.
This is almost entirely backwards. Almost none of the light is absorbed: Almost all of it is reflected, specularly. That’s why gold is shiny. A small amount of it (but not just one single wavelength) is absorbed, and what’s absorbed is in the blue range, the most un-gold color you can have. Since what’s absorbed is blue, what’s left is proportionately more yellowish.
Yeah. And 50 years ago you would have blamed Kennedy. I saw editorial cartoons of that sort at the time.
IME, most moon rocks are mid-grey with either a brownish or greenish tint. Some (the Genesis Rock, for instance) are largely white because anorthite is largely white.
Metals behave differently to non-metals. Lack of polarisation and the lack of any penetration into the material alone make the reflections have a different character. Surface roughness at very small scales also makes a difference.
But as noted above - context is everything. Colours change depending upon their surrounds. Browns only look brown when placed next to other colours. Otherwise they look dark yellow or orange/red. (There is no colour in the CIE gamut that can be identified as brown in isolation.)
Just for completeness, the James Webb Space Telescope has mirrors whose structure is made from beryllium, but they are coated in gold. The JWST is intended for infra-red work, and gold is particularly good here.