Indulge me with an experiment: take a quick look around you, wherever you are, and count off the number of metal objects you see. Feel free to stop when you’ve run out of fingers. Now repeat that with stone objects. The result, invariably, is that metal far outweighs stone. It’s a fact of human progress: in prehistory, dating back millennia, periods are named after the metals copper, bronze and iron because they leapfrogged our collective development as a species so much.
There is, however, one noble metal that goes
