while browsing i came apon this subject...........
....me ....
Fool’s Gold
Our next step is one decidedly outside the realm of scientific certainty.
David Hudson, a farmer living in Arizona, was trying to extract gold and silver from the tailings of an abandoned mine in the mid-1970s.
In the process, he found a mysterious substance that defied analysis, despite years of experimentation by reputable laboratories, undertaken at great personal expense.
Here the details get very fuzzy, but it seems that Hudson eventually concluded the white powder he’d found was gold in a monatomic (or, as he called it, monoatomic) state, in which each atom was physically separate from all others, rather than being joined in molecular groups as is more common. (There are some good reasons to doubt that Hudson’s gold truly was monatomic, but that’s neither here nor there.)
He also, somehow, developed a process for creating (or separating) this special form of gold from ordinary metallic gold - though how he managed to figure this out without any scientific training is unclear.
In any case, this white powder gold, according to Hudson, has some rather amazing properties: it is allegedly a high-temperature superconductor and, when heated in just the right way, weighs less than nothing - it can levitate. And, of course, it has a long list of incredible health benefits.
Hudson received patents in Britain and Australia (though not, interestingly, in the U.S.) for this special form of gold and 10 other elements, which he referred to collectively as Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements (ORMEs). (I should interject that the awarding of a patent does not mean that a government agency has successfully reproduced the invention in question or even that they have validated it as being scientifically sound.)
Then Hudson began reading about alchemy, and he became convinced that his white powder gold was the stuff of legend - well, many legends, in fact. He equated it with “manna,” “the philosopher’s stone,” “the food of the gods,” and “the elixir of life,” among other things.
Hudson believed he had rediscovered an ancient alchemical formula. He began promoting this belief in New Age and mystical circles, which eagerly latched onto it and have been proclaiming it as truth ever since. And, naturally, numerous companies sell solid or liquid forms of “white powder gold” supposedly created using variants of Hudson’s recipe.
Hard to Swallow
Needless to say, consumers have to take the composition of this substance on faith. Maybe it really is monatomic gold, maybe not. But if it is, so what? That doesn’t make it magical... and it certainly doesn’t make it the philosopher’s stone.
You’d think claims of room temperature superconductivity could be tested readily enough, and that if true, they would be headline news. You’d think a substance that possesses anti-gravity capabilities would attract some scientific attention.
And you’d think that if this substance had any meaningful health benefits - let alone the promise of an indefinite lifespan - researchers would be tripping over themselves trying to demonstrate this in objective studies, the better to sell more of the stuff and benefit all of humanity.
Curiously, none of this appears to be the case. Hudson himself, meanwhile, has reportedly halted his research, partly due to heart disease - an ailment apparently beyond the healing capabilities of his magical elixir - and partly due to actions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that he considered harassment.
Whatever else can be said about white powder gold, I can testify that it has the magical power to give me a headache - merely by reading about it.
http://www.null-hypothesis.co.uk/article/285
