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How do you deal with the density of gold in TV shows and movies?
It felt like it went on for a couple of weeks. I kept getting the same promoted tweet on twitter (I can’t even find it now). It was an ad for the show Money Heist on Netflix.
I really don’t know much about the show, but the ad shows some people scuba diving inside of a flooded vault and picking up some gold bars. Like this.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, but they didn’t use real gold here. Oh, it looks like it’s really underwater — but there’s no way you could hold up gold like that. Even underwater, that gold would be legitimately heavy. The reason: gold is super dense. Like really, really dense.
What the heck is density? It’s a property of a substance (not an object). It is the ratio of the object’s mass divided by its volume (mass per unit volume). Some people use the symbol d for density, but in physics we usually use the Greek letter ρ (rho).
Gold has a density of 19.32 grams/centimeter³ (g/cm³) or 1.932 x 10⁴ kg/m³. Just compare this to some other substances:
- Water = 1 g/cm³.
- Aluminum = 2.7 g/cm³.
