Alchemy, the ancient art of turning base metals into precious ones, was built on more than one misapprehension. The obvious error is that it is impossible to turn lead into gold. (Not quite impossible, actually. Chemistry will not do the job but a particle accelerator will, although not cheaply. In 1980, researchers bombarded the faintly lead-like metal bismuth and created a few atoms of gold. The cost was a less-than-economical rate of one quadrillion dollars an ounce.)

But there is a subtler mistake — not a scientific one but a matter of economics. “The alchemist fallacy” is the belief that once a simple method is found for turning lead into gold, gold will continue to be precious. We don’t have to rely on economic theory to refute this conclusion, because we have a fascinating case study of a close parallel.

Twenty-six million years ago, some cataclysmic event in the Eastern Sahara raised the temperature of silica sand to well over 1,000 degrees. The result was a large deposit of a lustrous material the colour of a lemon’s flesh. A fragment of this precious stuff was used to make jewellery for Tutankhamun’s tomb. (The story is well told in Steven Johnson’s book How We Got to Now.) The substance could be quarried but not manufactured.

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