At just one part per billion of Earth's crust, gold has inspired efforts to extract it from the sea and make it through nuclear physics.
With its price at a six-year low, gold is likely to figure highly on many holiday season shopping lists this year.
But while investors may fear the price is likely to fall below the symbolic US$1,000 (Dh3,670) an ounce before long, anyone lucky enough to receive gold as a gift can take comfort in its famously timeless qualities.
It doesn’t tarnish, won’t rust and resists virtually all alkalis and acids. The most malleable of all metal, a single gram of gold can be hammered into a sheet double the width of this newspaper, and so thin you could see daylight through it.
And of course, gold is famously rare. No one knows for sure just how much gold is out there. Not everyone is keen to talk about how much they have stashed away.
The World Gold Council estimates there is about 184,000 tonnes sitting in government reserves, bank vaults and personal collections.
That sounds a lot until one takes into account the notorious heft of gold: just a litre of it weighs more than 19 kilograms.
That means that all of the gold extracted from the Earth over the thousands of years it’s been treasured could fit into a box measuring just 22 metres on all sides.
It’s that rarity – amounting to about 1 part per billion of the Earth’s crust – that has kept gold’s value over timescales beyond those of even the most long-term of investors.
It has spawned a host of stories, starting with King Croesus of Lydia (part of modern Turkey), whose minting of the first gold coins about 2,500 years ago made him a byword for unimaginable wealth.
It also provided the spark for one of the most bizarre scientific projects in history.
Appalled by the economic plight of his beloved Germany after the First World War, the Nobel chemistry laureate Fritz Haber searched for a solution, and believed he had found it in seawater.
Years earlier, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist and fellow Nobel laureate, had estimated that erosion of gold-bearing rocks had washed an average of about six milligrams of gold into every cubic metre of the world’s oceans.
Haber estimated that if gold could be extracted from seawater, it could pay off Germany’s crippling war reparations.
Working in great secrecy for fear of unnerving the gold market, he assembled a team of scientists to find ways of extracting gold on an industrial scale.
In 1923, with the German economy in the grip of hyperinflation, they began a survey of the concentration of gold in seawater.
The results were disastrous: Arrhenius’s estimate proved wildly optimistic.
The actual concentration of gold in seawater was hundreds of times lower than he had claimed, making extraction of it hopelessly uneconomical.
Haber had run into an ineluctable problem, for it’s not by chance that gold is rare: it’s actually built into the design of the universe.
Every gold atom has a hefty nucleus of 79 protons, whose mutual repulsion can only be overcome using the sub-atomic “glue” supplied by adding more than 100 neutrons.
As such, the conditions needed to create gold atoms only exist in events of astronomical violence, such as the death of giant stars in supernovas.
The gold in every ring thus has its origins in a fearsome cosmic forge in the far-distant past – a fact with more than a few resonances with The Lord of the Rings.
Now astronomers believe they can add another dramatic chapter to the story of how the Earth was given its gold.
It has emerged from research aimed at solving another mystery: how the Earth got its moon.
The current view is that the moon is the outcome of a cataclysmic event that took place just after the formation of the solar system about 4,500 million years ago.
Analysis of rocks brought back by the Apollo space missions and computer simulations suggest that about 30 million years after the Earth was formed it was struck by a chunk of debris about the size of Mars.
The resulting collision put a huge amount of debris into orbit around the Earth, which gravity pulled together to form the Moon.
Reporting their results in the journal Nature, the researchers pointed out another implication of their work.
While much of the debris may just have flown by the moon, some of it would have slammed into the early Earth, thus delivering any gold trapped within them.
So now it seems that gold may be the end result of not one but two dramatic events – its creation in the deaths of giant stars, followed by delivery by interplanetary impact.
While scientists now have a pretty good idea of the source of natural gold, one challenge continues to defy them: actually making the stuff in bulk.
According to legend, the secret lies in finding the Philosopher’s Stone, a material with the ability to turn base metal into gold.
As far back as Roman times alchemists tried to find the stone, and a fear they might succeed – thus wrecking the gold market – prompted the emperor Diocletian to ban all research into the subject.
After centuries of failure to find the stone, the brilliant 11th century Islamic polymath Avicenna declared that transmutation of one element to another was impossible.
If alchemists had listened to him, they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble, as he was centuries ahead of his time. It’s now known that no chemical process can turn base metals into gold.
But what chemists can’t do, physicists can. In a little-known experiment carried out in 1980, a team of researchers showed that nuclear physics possesses powers of which alchemists could only dream of.
Led by Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel laureate from the University of California, the team used a particle accelerator to blast atomic nuclei at the base metal bismuth.
After hours of irradiation the process was complete – and atoms of gold had been created out of bismuth.
The amount, however, was so small that Seaborg calculated creating just one ounce of the stuff would have cost more than the entire world’s gross domestic product.
As generous as people can be at this time of year, it’s probably best not to expect freshly made gold atoms for a gift any time soon.
Robert Matthews is visiting professor of Science at Aston University, Birmingham