Gold

Originally Posted by Copper Head

If you consider a typical electronics gizmo .
We have been told Gold is the best for conductivity and being able to be thinned with substance to it.
I once heard an ounce of Gold could be thinned out the size of a foot ball field . Those unique qualities
being said , Gold could be replaced with a better conductor, I believe the computer industry lowered the Gold content
by using silicon & silicon could transfer information faster .

Silver actually conducts electricity better than gold, matter of fact if we are being totally honest about the resistance, and conductivity of metals, silver is the absolute best conductor of electricity, followed not by gold, but instead by copper. That's right, copper conducts electricity better than gold, not by much, but it does. Please refer to this link or google it:

Table of Electrical Resistivity and Conductivity

So now you are probably asking, "why use gold at all"? It's simple, silver, and copper, oxidize over time. Meaning that they oxidize in the presence of oxygen, they are reactive. A silver or copper coin will turn colors, while a gold coin will never unless alloyed and not pure, with some metal that does, and there is enough to react with oxygen.

So gold is plated over copper to prevent it from oxidizing, this is why industry is not required to use a lot of gold, but instead, only enough to cover the copper so that it does not react with the oxygen in the air. If copper does react, it build up copper oxides which cause resistance and thus the copper no longer is as conductive as it would be if not oxidized.



But you are correct, gold can be stretched, made to be extremely flat:

Gold is so malleable that a single ounce of it (about the size of a quarter) can be beaten into a thin continuous sheet measuring roughly 100 square feet. That means it would take 576 ounces (or just 36 pounds) of gold to completely cover a football field, or a whopping 367,211 ounces (or about 11 tons) of gold to completely blanket all of Central Park.

One ounce of gold can be stretched into a thin wire measuring only five microns, or five millionths of a meter, thick, that would reach in a straight line from midtown Manhattan across Long Island Sound to Bridgeport, Connecticut--a distance of 80 kilometers or 50 miles.

Source: Gold Fun Facts

So far as Silicon is concerned, the computer industry uses silicon because it is a semi-conductor and can be made to act as a conductor or insulator, which allows for the printing of circuits including gates, resistors, etc. You might be thinking of the fairly recent invention, using carbon atoms and building them into nano-tubes which do conduct electricity not only better than gold, but also better than even silver.

Hope this helps,

Scott