Sylvain Neuvel's book "Sleeping Giants" mentioned that the giant figure that's central to the book was made partly of iridium - "which weighs twice as much as lead." I tend to think of lead as being really heavy, and didn't realize we had a regular, stable element that weighed twice as much. Which got me curious about the relative weights of the metals. The water and the woods are there as comparators: I worked with wood years ago so I'm familiar, and we all know they float in water. This is a selective list: sorry, it wasn't my intent to list "all metals." It's no accident that water is "1": it's part of the design of the Metric System.
Material | Density (g/cm3) at room temp. |
---|---|
Balsa wood | 0.04-0.34 |
Lithium | 0.534 |
Maple wood | 0.6-0.75 |
Water | 1 |
Aluminum | 2.70 |
Iron | 7.87 |
Copper | 8.96 |
Silver | 10.49 |
Lead | 11.34 |
Mercury | 13.53 |
Uranium | 19.1 |
Tungsten | 19.3 |
Gold | 19.30 |
Platinum | 21.45 |
Iridium | 22.56 |
Osmium | 22.59 |
Most data from Wikipedia, Maple from here.
Fascinating to think that all the metals above Mercury in the table would float it it at room temperature ...