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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SilverSurfer, post: 797174, member: 21603&quot;]I&#039;m wondering why you guys call Gold a noble metal.....Nobel as in a nobel gas.&nbsp; Nobel gases don&#039;t combine with anything, they just are.&nbsp; Gold can be made into an alloy, so I&#039;d think a chemical bond with something else is possible.&nbsp; If a chemical bond is possible, then if a metal is 100% pure, this might leave bonds that haven&#039;t combined with anything.&nbsp; I wonder if something, possibly oxygen, chemically combines with the metal at the surface.&nbsp; I wonder because I remember an experiment in college where we tried to explain the refractive index of a purely silicon substrate.&nbsp; It turned out to be that silicon forms 4 chemical bonds, so if the substrate were 100% pure silicon, there would have to exist &quot;dangling&quot; bonds, just waiting to combine with something.&nbsp; That something turned out to be oxygen, and the refractive index proved that sure enough, the surface of the substrate was actually silicon oxide.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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