For thousands of years, one of the most valuable elements on the periodic table has been silver.

Silver has been valued for its use in coins and jewelry and has several unique properties that no other metal has.

Today, silver is still as treasured as it was thousands of years ago,

but it is being used in ways that the ancients never could have imagined.

Learn more about silver, its history, and its uses,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. To start our discussion of this precious metal we should probably start with the physical properties of silver.

Silver has an atomic number of 47, which means that it has 47 protons in its nucleus.

It sits immediately below copper on the periodic table and immediately above gold and it shares

physical properties with both of these elements.

What makes a silver atom special and it's a property shared with copper and gold is that its highest electron shell has only one electron in it.

This is a big reason why silver is so special, the reasons for which I'll get into in a bit.

The chemical abbreviation for silver is AG.G. which comes from the Latin name for

silver, Argentum. Silver has two naturally occurring isotopes, Silver 107 and silver 109.

What's odd is that they're almost equal in abundance,

which is something you almost never see for elements.

Usually if there's more than one natural isotope of an element,

there is one that's overwhelmingly abundant and others being very scarce.

Silver, like gold, is not very reactive, although not so much as gold.

If you have silver items in your house and they tarnish over time, it's actually the

non- silver metal in the alloy, usually copper, which is responsible for the

tarnishing, not the silver per se. But that being said, silver can react with

sulfur that's in the air and that can tarnish silver directly.

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