Transcript (en)

Drop mercury onto gold leaf and it immediately eats a hole through it. So is it true that mercury eats gold? To see if it's true, let's add more mercury from these thermometers to the gold leaf. It looks calm, but things are already brewing. But here is the real explanation. Mercury doesn't destroy gold, because mercury is a liquid metal. It acts like a sponge, sliding inside the gold's structure and pulling the atoms into a liquid blend called a gold amalgam. Under a magnifying glass, this process makes it look like the mercury has an invisible, gaping maw, devouring the leaf. What if we stir them together? Wherever the mercury touches, the gold simply vanishes, until not even a trace remains. The yellow color disappears into a silver puddle, but the gold is still fully there, just trapped inside the liquid.