Fool’s gold

I had just returned home from my work in the AI lab.  I was feeling great.  Our new program had passed the Turing Test for a half hour – a new record.  Twenty human judges had been unable to tell, at better than chance level, between a human interlocutor or our program, as they chatted by text and audio.

My career was going great and my personal life was also ready for the next level.  It was time to propose marriage to my girlfriend Rebecca.  Browsing the internet for engagement rings, though, I was getting a severe case of sticker shock.  Gold prices were insane!  There had to be a better way.  Luckily Google Ads came up with a helpful suggestion for once.  There was an equally beautiful ring that wouldn’t break the bank.  It was a copper-silver alloy with pyrite nanoparticles in its surface.  It was every bit as yellow, shiny, durable, and non-tarnishing as gold.

“PYRITE?!?!” yelled Rebecca as she threw the ring in my face.  “You got me a fool’s gold ring and asked me to marry you?!!  I couldn’t be more insulted if you tried!  Get out of my face before I do something to you that I’ll regret!  And if you ever want to give me a ring, it had damn well better be real gold!”

I hadn’t meant to tell her about the materials that were used to make the ring – it’s not important, after all!  But when she held it in the palm of her hand, she asked why it didn’t seem to weigh as much as it should.  At that point, I had to tell.

After things calmed down a bit, I looked again at gold rings on the market.  I still couldn’t stomach the prices.  Desperate, I called my brother.  Kevin is a materials scientist at a cutting edge electronics manufacturer, and I know he’d worked on developing substitutes for gold in circuitry.  I explained my problem.  “You’ve got amazing luck,” he said.  “Our new substitute for gold had to be not only as electrically conductive and non-corroding, but also have the same heat capacity, and the only way we could manage that is to give it the same density.  Furthermore, the electron behavior at the surface of this metal also gives the same color.  There is absolutely no way to tell Gold Minus from any other gold without looking inside it, with X-rays for example.  We call it Gold Minus because it’s gold, minus the price tag – get it?  I have excess from our last test batch; I can just give you a little.”

I found an artisan who would forge the Gold Minus into a ring.  I didn’t tell them where this material came from and they never asked, since it was just as malleable as they expected.  Their price was steep, but still under the rip-off artists’ prices.  And anyway, as an AI researcher and huge fan of the Turing Test, I thought I was proving a point.  This stuff had all the useful properties of gold – therefore, it WAS gold.

And that’s why I’m single now.

The day after I gave her the ring, I found it shoved under my door with a note in Rebecca’s handwriting saying “X-ray crystallography!  IT’S OVER!”  I tried to explain that this metal has all the relevant properties, therefore it IS gold.  But she countered that the one key property of gold is the one that EXPLAINS why it’s yellow, shiny, malleable, non-tarnishing, heavy, and so on.  And the property that does that explaining is having atomic number 79.  And the X-ray crystallography proved that this stuff didn’t have it.  And that while it might take genius to find such a matching set of properties, a genius who doesn’t listen makes a lousy spouse, and a lousy boyfriend.

Ring for sale, size 7, Gold Minus.