Posted by Tom Napier on October 12, 2012 at 12:39:34 user Didymus.
In Reply to: Re: why bother with the ingot? posted by Peter Hyland on October 12, 2012 at 10:57:42:
I loved PP as a ten-year-old because I too tinkered with chemistry and electrical gadgets. As an adult I wondered why Dick didn't pick up the cocoa tin at some point and say, "Wait a minute, gold dust would be much heavier than this." Adam Quinan's thorough note on the chemistry of PP (see link in his post above) gives the densities of chalcopyrite and gold but doesn't explicitly point out that gold has nearly five times the density of chalcopyrite. The half full cocoa tin would have weighed about one pound in one case and five pounds in the other, a rather noticeable difference. Dick also had to overlook the smell of the sulfur dioxide resulting from his blowpiping of the pyrite.
Let's blame it on Nancy. An Amazon pirate should have recognized another pyrite.