Every nation, including the United States, must maintain monetary discipline to sustain a healthy economy. A return to a gold standard could promote economic stability by imposing fiscal restraint and restoring some of the moral and spiritual integrity that once underpinned America’s greatness.
That is, admittedly, a bold claim. After all, one might argue that gold, like paper money, can be used in the pursuit of material gain. Indeed, there is probably no place on Earth that would refuse gold in exchange for goods. Gold’s monetary and spiritual history extends back at least 5,000 years.
Gold is more than a medium of exchange; it is a sacred metal long associated with religious reverence. Consider this revealing passage from Charlotte Behr of the University of Roehampton in an article published by a volunteer archaeological program managed by the U.K. government:
“Gold has long been associated with a divine sphere in pre-Christian and Christian religions. Its shine, indestructible nature, malleability, and relative scarcity made it an ideal material for embodying divine qualities and expressing human veneration of the divine. Gold was perceived as an appropriate material with which to address the gods (Elbern 1988).”
“Temples, sanctuaries, and churches were decorated lavishly with golden or gilded statues and images. Liturgical equipment was made out of gold (La Niece 2009).”
“The gods of Germanic myths lived, according to the Völuspá, in a hall covered in gold and played with golden board games (Pálsson 1996, stanzas 60 and 61).”
“Janes, in his book ‘God and Gold in Late Antiquity‘, has shown the continuity of the use of gold and its numerous associations with the numinous, from a pre-Christian to a Christian world. Liturgical vessels, reliquaries, crosses, and objects used in sacred rituals were made of gold. There is also a long tradition of votive offerings… in the form of tablets made in precious metals, gold or silver, and dedicated to a divinity…” (Janes 1998).
Gold’s association with the divine helps explain why it is valued not merely for utility but for beauty. Its intrinsic beauty possesses a sacred quality. Simone Weil, the great French religious philosopher of the mid-20th century, wrote that once gold disappeared from the French monetary system, those who sought to accumulate money became increasingly “desirous of power.” In other words, money, untethered from a tangible, finite asset, more easily becomes an instrument of control. By contrast, the accumulation of money linked to gold is, in some sense, the accumulation of something sacred. To use the sacred as a mechanism of domination, however, would itself verge on blasphemy.
The Unique Properties of Gold
Gold has not only long been associated with the divine; its extraordinary qualities can also be taken as suggestive of a deeper order in nature. Part of gold’s enduring beauty lies in the fact that it does not readily combine with oxygen and therefore does not tarnish. This unusual characteristic contributes to its inherent luster and helps explain why the metal has been revered across civilizations.
Another remarkable property of gold is its near indestructibility. Although acids can dissolve gold, a metallurgist can recover the metal to its original state. During World War II, the French dissolved Olympic gold medals in acid to conceal them from the enemy. After the war, the gold was recovered through a specialized chemical process and remade into medals. Melted or dissolved, gold remains gold. By contrast, when most other metals are melted or chemically altered, some of their constituent materials combine with oxygen or other elements to form new compounds.
Gold’s apparent indestructibility means that all the gold ever mined still exists somewhere on Earth. It is also the world’s most malleable and ductile metal. Both properties reflect their extraordinary flexibility. This matters because gold has so often been used to fashion objects honoring the divine. Malleability refers to how easily a material can be shaped; one measure of this is how thin it can be hammered. Gold can be beaten to astonishing thinness—thin enough to become translucent. Gold leaf so thin that 10,000 sheets would equal a single millimeter would still retain its visible beauty. One ounce of gold at that thickness could cover roughly 900 square feet. Ductility refers to how far a material can be stretched. A single ounce of gold can be drawn into a wire approximately 50 miles long, with a thickness of about 20 atoms. Even brief reflection suggests that gold’s beauty, malleability, and apparent permanence make it uniquely suited to serve as a divine metal.
Gold is used only sparingly in industry. While its unique properties could make it valuable across a wider array of industrial applications, they also make it an exceptional store of value. Gold remains the only major non-paper reserve asset. One might ask: What could better anchor a monetary system than a substance that cannot be destroyed and effectively has an unlimited lifespan? Such qualities have traditionally been regarded as sacred and can help restrain the corrupting power of money. As the biblical book of Timothy warns, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Money is clearly necessary for commerce and human advancement. Yet if money carries a sacred dimension, it becomes more likely that progress will serve the common good rather than mere appetite.
The Existential Mystery of Proton 79
It is also true that the origin of gold in our solar system remains uncertain. Scientists have proposed that gold may be created through nuclear processes involving extremely dense neutron stars. Yet that theory has often been challenged on the grounds that conditions inside such stars may not be sufficiently energetic to produce gold or other heavy metals such as the platinum-group metals (PGMs).
This has led scientists to consider rarer and more violent events—such as the collision of two neutron stars or two black holes—as possible sources of the immense heat and energy required to create heavy elements. Although such cataclysmic events could, in principle, generate dense metals, their rarity makes it difficult to assume that they account for all the gold and PGMs found on Earth. And even if one grants such origins, there remains the further question of how gold came to possess the unique qualities that set it apart from other metals.
Chemically, elements are defined by the number of protons in their nucleus, which corresponds to the number of orbiting electrons in a neutral atom. Gold has 79 protons. In theory, one might therefore imagine creating gold by removing a proton from mercury or adding one to platinum. In practice, however, this would require engineering multiple nuclear reactions beyond current feasibility—or at least beyond economic reason. One would also have to avoid producing a radioactive isotope. Yet even if these hurdles were overcome, the result might resemble gold without fully possessing its distinctive malleability and ductility. That is because some of gold’s unusual properties do not appear to arise simply from its inventory of protons, neutrons, and electrons.
30,000 Leagues Under the Electron Sea
Many attempts have been made to explain the chemistry of gold. One of the more speculative ideas emerges from a physical model originally introduced by Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. This model is often referred to as the “electron sea,” and among its implications is the existence of negative energy.
The electron sea can be imagined as densely packed particles moving rapidly past one another. Such a model could help account for gold’s extraordinary malleability and ductility, though perhaps not in the full measure that makes gold singular. In other words, without something like an electron sea, gold would not truly be gold. This suggests that even if the universe contains enough highly energetic events to produce gold in quantities sufficient to reach Earth—such as neutron-star collisions—it still does not necessarily follow that the resulting material would possess all the familiar properties of gold.
I have long been fascinated by the electron sea, not least because it helped inspire the prediction that every elementary particle has an antiparticle. My interest deepened after reading a 2023 article in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Physics suggesting that the prevailing model of quantum mechanics—the so-called Copenhagen interpretation—may not sit comfortably with the concept of an electron sea.
Instead, the article suggested that another framework associated with David Bohm and Louis de Broglie may offer a better fit. That sparked my interest. Though experimentally consistent with the Copenhagen interpretation, Bohm’s view of physics differs sharply in its metaphysics and ontology. Martin Gardner, the celebrated mathematical writer who for many years edited the ‘Mathematical Games’ column in Scientific American, argued that Bohm’s model verged on panpsychism—the idea that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, present in all matter rather than unique to human beings. He wrote that in 1959. Today, panpsychism is taken seriously by many philosophers, including Thomas Nagel, as a plausible framework for understanding reality.
Bohm regarded his metaphysics as compatible with the existence of the paranormal or of a higher power. Interestingly, although Bohm and Dirac worked in London at the same time, there is no indication that they ever discussed physics with one another. Even so, later scholars have attempted to connect their ideas. If it is true that gold is better explained within a Bohmian framework, then some of the foundations of modern physics might themselves be read as suggestive of a higher power or divine order. The Copenhagen interpretation, associated with Niels Bohr, is not necessarily more agnostic than the model proposed by Bohm and de Broglie. Bohr’s framework emphasizes waves and probabilities; Bohm’s offers a more explicitly causal account involving particles.
Still, while this line of thought may hint at a connection between gold and the divine, the proposed relationship among Dirac’s electron sea, Bohmian mechanics, and gold remains far too tentative to be treated as more than an intriguing speculation. The explanation currently favored by many theoretical chemists—including the distinguished Spanish chemist M. Concepción Gimeno—is that Einstein’s special theory of relativity is the principal reason for many of gold’s unusual properties. Yet even this explanation raises difficult questions and, if correct, may itself lend support to a broader case for intelligent design. Special relativity is built upon the strict upper limit imposed by the speed of light and the assumption that the laws of physics remain the same regardless of one’s inertial frame of motion.
Most importantly, no matter how fast two observers move relative to one another, both will measure light as traveling at the same speed. This was Einstein’s first great theory, and among its consequences is time dilation—the familiar thought experiment in which one twin travels at near-light speed and ages more slowly than the twin who remains at rest. A related implication is that the effective mass of a particle, including an electron, increases as its velocity approaches the speed of light.
The Most Noble of all Metals
Gold has the highest atomic number among the noble metals: 79. Its nucleus contains more protons than any other noble metal, and this in turn affects the behavior of its electrons, especially those in the inner shells, whose relativistic mass becomes significantly greater than their rest mass. Theoretical chemists regard this relativistic-to-rest-mass ratio as a principal reason gold surpasses the other noble metals in malleability, ductility, luster, nobility, and apparent permanence.
Even so, the evidence commonly offered in support of this relativistic explanation appears incomplete. Gold’s chemical properties are not merely somewhat different from those of neighboring metals; the difference seems discontinuous—far greater than one would expect from the addition of a single proton. If one examines the noble metals comparatively, gold stands above them to a degree that appears disproportionate to such a small structural change. Chemists often assess reactivity using three measures: standard reduction potential, electronegativity, and electron affinity. By all three measures, gold ranks first, with platinum generally second.
Moreover, the standard reduction potential—the most reliable of these measures—indicates that gold is about 25% less reactive than platinum. The difference in the other two measures is closer to 10%. Such substantial gaps are not easily explained by relatively modest differences in relativistic ratios. In theory, those ratios may account for gold’s color and luster, but the chemical measures of its nobility suggest that another factor may also be involved.
As noted above, gold’s atomic number is one greater than platinum’s, meaning it has one additional proton and one additional electron. The extra proton helps explain the relativistic differences between the two elements. But what of the extra electron? In many ways, that difference may be even more consequential. Platinum’s outer shell contains five electrons, whereas the comparable shell in gold contains six. Although the outer shell is not affected in the same direct way by the additional proton, the extra electron gives gold an especially stable atomic structure. That stability may be a central factor in gold’s exceptional behavior.
There is no evidence that gold has ever truly been destroyed. In the earlier example of gold dissolved in aqua regia and later fully recovered, recreating Olympic medals would not have been possible had those medals been made of platinum. Platinum, moreover, reacts with oxygen and tarnishes at high temperatures; gold does not. In other words, one infinitesimally small particle—which in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, including Bohm’s, is not ultimately a particle at all but a wave—helps determine whether a substance endures indefinitely or gradually degrades over time. Gold’s enduring nobility reflects its affinity with the divine and makes it an unparalleled store of value. At least to me, that bears the mark of a higher order.
Coincidence Obeys No Laws
Some people dismiss coincidences as trivial. Others regard them as openings into the sacred—signs of human meaning within what otherwise appears to be senseless disorder. A passage from Roberto Bolaño’s ‘2666’ has always remained with me:
“Coincidence obeys no laws, and if it does, we don’t know what they are. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.”
For Bolaño, one may choose to see the world either as an endless quagmire or as something suffused with transcendent spirituality.
Is it merely a coincidence that when America abandoned the gold standard, the country’s unity and spiritual coherence also began to erode, and the United States became, in my view, increasingly hollow and soulless? I do not believe so.
Gold’s distinctiveness—its scientifically elusive qualities, its role in the world’s religions, its universal appeal as an object of beauty, and its global acceptance as a store of value and medium of exchange—marks it as both material and spiritual. One might even wonder whether it is coincidental that a single additional electron in an outer shell can mark the difference between the mundane and the divine. Gold’s one extra electron is one of countless signs that invite us to acknowledge some form of intelligent design rather than bow uncritically before the apotheosis of science.
In closing, let us return to Dirac, whom many regard as one of the greatest physicists in history. In his mid-20s, Dirac reportedly suggested that science was sufficient to understand the laws of the universe and that God was therefore unnecessary. He further proposed that belief in a higher power likely arose among primitive peoples who lacked explanations for nature’s dangers and irregularities. Yet three decades later, in an article for Scientific American, Dirac wrote:
“It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of incredible beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge shows that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand the universe better.”
Gold itself appears intelligently ordered, and this should compel humanity to restore gold to its proper place as the only monetary foundation capable of reconciling the practical necessity of currency with the moral imperative to build a better society. In doing so, we may avoid the pathologies so evident in the contemporary world, where those in power have succumbed to the temptation to worship money—a force that, when severed from the sacred, corrodes our humanity, alienates us from the divine, and undermines our natural inheritance: the opportunity to evolve and create a better society for all.
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