Playing with quicksilver

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?   Jeremiah 17:9    Not long ago, maybe only two generations or so, it was still common for high school students to play around with a material called “quicksilver” in their science classrooms. Like its name implies, the material is as shiny as pure silver but a liquid at room temperature. Drop it and it shatters into thousands of tiny beads that, when gathered back together, will coalesce back into a single...