Quicksilver

In another of my wanderings through the periodic table [link], I started contemplating a post about Mercury - or Quicksilver as it was called in times past.

Quicksilver is a liquid metal at standard room temperature and pressure, the only one. It's useful in all sorts of industrial applications, from medicine to gold mining. It is also extremely toxic.

If you have ever seen a beaker of mercury, you know how fascinating it is. The shine and look grab your attention. It moves kind of like water but not really, and has the colour of silver - highly polished shiny silver that reflects everything around it as it sits there and trembles.

Even a small volume is heavy, confusing the brain to begin with. Lift up a quarter-full beaker and the question marks fly out your ears. Your body and brain do not understand how a liquid could have this heft. Pour some onto a non-reactive surface (glass or iron) and you see the pronounced meniscus, the curvature at the edges of the sample. And with the slightest provocation, the blob of mercury will split into a bunch of rivulets, baby dribbles of silver running with gravity this way and that. Then the rivulets turn to blobs, sitting there, waiting. Gravity likes playing with an element with such a high atomic number.

So here's my metaphor: I think negative emotions can be like Mercury. We start with a beaker of them, all contained by the glass. Then one day something happens, and a little spills out. The liquid metal runs downhill as fast as it can, seeking the lowest point. That's the nature of everything subject to gravity. So we of course go chasing after the Mercury, because it's kinda funky, and all shiny and unusual. It's interesting to see how it reacts to the world.

But then we find that chasing Mercury and getting it back into the beaker are two different things. We can't just scoop it up, because some will inevitably escape. It's decidedly tricky to vacuum or sweep back into one spot, for the same reason. It's the damnedest stuff. The more we try to contain the spill, the more divided and hard to keep track of it becomes.

We manage to collect some of the Mercury in, say, a dustpan, but not all of it is there. So we have to keep going back to find the missing blobs. Suddenly you see shiny specks of Mercury in the carpet, or between the floorboards. Now you realize that you're unlikely to ever completely retrieve it, to put the entire amount you started with back into the beaker.

Then it hits you. Shit. This stuff is poisonous. Hell, what do I do now? I wish I'd never started fooling with this gear in the first place.











Photo from here. [link]