682 Confidence Of Ignorance.

Although I appreciate your effort to turn around the “Heart of Gold” saying, your attempt is severely lacking in reality. Your description of gold, while technically in line with some of the qualitative properties that gold has, is lacking the key aspects that make gold what it is. Most notably is that Gold, being a metal, is lustrous. That’s another way of saying is shiny. It’s reflective. All metals have the property of being lustrous or semi-lustrous. It’s caused by the same thing that defines them as a metal. If gold weren’t shiny it would be, in every meaningful sense of the phrase, just a rock.

So while I commend you for the attempt, I feel I must point out some facts that are glaringly obvious to me. Your description, while not very accurate for gold, is quite accurate for solid elemental Sulfur. Besides, a heart of sulfur would make you point much more pointy. Sulfur is brittle, easily tarnished*, and smelly when it’s hot. In addition to being cold, hard and yellow.

Another detail that I consider to be worth pointing out is that an actual heart, that is, an actual, human, heart, is (once you get past all the various other things that obstruct your view and get some good light on it) Yellow**. Besides, by the standards of anyone who isn’t used to separating organs from their organisms and viewing them on their own, a human heart is downright ugly. It’s all squishy and bulbous and it writhes when it’s working. In fact, if you open the myocardial sack (protective skin around the heart) and expose it to open air while it’s pumping, it makes the most unsettling squishing sound as in moves back and forth. Basically, what I’m saying is that even without comparing a living heart to a lump of mineral, it’s not very hard to make a case that hearts are disgusting. Such is biology, when it comes down to it.

Finally, I have two last bits of nit-picking to do. Gold is neither cold, nor hard, by any quantitative standard. It is, in fact, one of the softest metals. And the majority of non-metals attain comparable or better hardness if organised into similar crystalin structures. A prime example is carbon, which forms a sort of odd diamond in that structure. And it’s a common misconception that metals are cold. A metal plate and a wooden one at room temperature feel like they’re at different temperatures to the touch. Which is a misleading piece of information. The human body tends to be an average of around 25-35 degrees Fahrenheit above room temperature. The nerve endings in your skin sense changes in temperature and localized differences in temperature, more than anything else. But wood is porous and made of non-metals. It is far less thermally conductive than any pure, solid metal. And at room temperature, everything else s colder than you are. So when you touch a piece of metal (that is colder than you are), it conducts heat away from your body much faster than wood or other organic materials, causing a spot on your skin that is colder than average for your body and colder than the surrounding skin, which has nothing to conduct heat away from it besides air. The nerves in your skin decide that what you’re feeling is colder than what you felt when you felt wood. This may all seem to mean nothing when you consider that hot metal still feels hotter than cold metal and hot wood still feels hotter than cold wood. “How can you really tell the difference,” you might ask. Here’s the difference: when both are colder than your body, metal feels colder. When both are at the same temperature and that temperature is higher than that of your body, however, the direction of heat flow is reversed so the hot metal will feel hotter than the hot wood. Again, this is simply because the heat is moving from the hot place to the cold place faster for the metal than for the wood. Note that this does, in fact mean that it’s easier to burn yourself on hot metal than hot wood. Similarly, it’s harder to get your tongue stuck to a pole in cold weather when the pole is made of wood, rather than metal. You should consider this an important lesson in the physics of heat, even if it isn’t 100% relevant to your original post.

* Technically, “tarnished” doesn’t accurately describe the effect of Sulfur’s reactivity, since the word only actually applies to things that started by being lustrous and then became dull, but it does make my point rather well.
** Well, that’s not entirely fair. It has a layer of protective fat around it which tends to absorb and store certain nutrients which make it yellow. The actual muscle isn’t yellow.