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Hiding Nobel prizes in plain sight
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- gjm11 16y agoClever, touching and funny ... but I'm not sure that "a jar of chlorauric acid, formed by dissolving the gold from two Nobels in aqua regia" quite counts as "Nobel prizes" any more, never mind "in plain sight".
- Muzza 16y agoPoetic license, ever hear of it?
- eavc 16y agoUnfortunately, there's a sizable segment of the HN crowd that foams at the mouth to practice pedantry.
- Natsu 16y agoComputers themselves are very pedantic, so we wouldn't be very good at using them if we weren't good at being technically correct. The compiler won't forgive you for missing a semicolon or mismatched parentheses. So I strongly suspect that our programming ability is related to our capacity for being pedantic, as annoying as that may be socially.
- Zev 16y agoSo I strongly suspect that our programming ability is related to our capacity for being pedantic, as annoying as that may be socially. Just like all tall people are good at basketball? Being a pedantic nit has nothing to do with one's ability to write code. Regardless, this is a pretty cool story.
- comex 16y agoBut people that are good at basketball do tend to be tall, and people that are good at programming quite possibly tend to be pedantic nits.
- Zev 16y agoThe inverse isn't always true. Correlation isnt causation, more than two points to a line, etc etc.
- Natsu 16y agoI never said that one caused the other, only that pedantry is necessary when writing correct computer programs. Huge bugs can come from small mistakes. The bug that tripped up Colin and ended up as a story on HN a while back was nothing more than a missing ++ in his code. Yet that tiny mistake screwed up the security of his cryptography.
- dasil003 16y ago"capacity for being pedantic" I doubt one would get very far in any kind of serious debugging session without the ability to be pedantic. It doesn't mean we can't judge the time and place for it.
- tudorachim 16y agoThe capacity for being pedantic isn't the socially annoying part; rather, it is the curious unwillingness of some nerds to exercise restraint that is.
- bartonfink 16y agoLiterally?
- sbierwagen 16y agoThey literally foam at the mouth? That sounds implausible. You should edit your comment.
- gjm11 16y agoI take it you think I was "foaming at the mouth to practise pedantry". Well, I certainly wasn't foaming, and it doesn't seem to me especially pedantic to want to distinguish between "hiding X in plain sight" and "doing something else that enables X to remain hidden", however clever that something-else may be -- because real Purloined-Letter-style "hiding in plain sight" is a different sort of trick, exploiting different human failings. Suppose, for instance, that instead of dissolving the Nobels de Hevesy had incorporated them into something that looked like a satirical picture mocking von Laue and Franck, and hung it on the wall. And suppose that had worked, in that the Nazi authorities never noticed that the picture had real Nobel prizes in it. That, to my mind, would have been clever-and-touching-and-funny in a different way to what de Hevesy actually did. Do you really think it's mouth-foamingly pedantic to want to have different terminology available for describing those different things?
- eavc 16y agoI'm sorry for the harshness of the earlier reply, but yes, I imagine that it was a kind of eager, if sincere, pedantry. I get where you are coming from, and again, the harshness was more aimed at the community's collective tendency.
- JonnieCache 16y agoI lost my poetic licence for taking a caesura too fast and failing to stop at an enjambment whilst under the influence of Auden. Never again. - Stephen Fry
- Natsu 16y agoIt's more like hiding the gold from Nobel prizes from the Nazis in plain sight. Still, it's a very interesting way to hide gold that most non-chemists would never think of. But it does give an interesting exercise: how else could you hide gold in a chemistry lab in such a way that at least the gold is retrievable? I can imagine submerging the prizes in various dangerous chemicals, but getting them clean enough to be safe afterward would be worrisome.
- kurtosis 16y agoif I was in that situation I would have likely just melted the gold and poured it into a hallowed out brick or something..
- Create 16y agoLFTR should be worth all the prizes and money :) (Wigner and Teller were more hawkish) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/LFTR https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/LFTR
- ars 16y agoThe Nobel prize is not the medal or the gold, it's the honor. They saved the gold, but the prize did not need saving.
- Create 16y ago...look at all the Peace in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pre-emptive war along with a pre-emptive prize. How encouraging for peace.
- Create 16y agoCounting "Nobel prizes" can go a long way[1]: if somebody was on a ship from Stockholm, and would be smart enough to win several Nobel prizes (on poker from drunk passengers)? [1] actually, it is from a novel https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Rejto_Jeno https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Rejto_Jeno
- Evgeny 16y agoAqua regia is nicknamed 'Tzar's vodka' in Russian.
- mtrn 16y agoI like the humor, although it's a bit scary.
- joshes 16y agoI imagine it takes some mighty wherewithal to so cleverly hide such important historical items under that level of pressure, what with the Nazi regime breathing down your neck and all.
- nazgulnarsil 16y agoI liked the episode of lupin the third where they melt down the gold and apply it the body of a truck and then paint it and drive it over the border. the guards search the truck, but the gold IS the truck.
- m_myers 16y agoLike the episode of Monk where an eccentric rich fellow wrote hundreds of volumes of his diary talking about his treasure. Nobody can figure out what his clues mean. Turns out he wrote them with gold ink.
- ubasu 16y agoOr Goldfinger?! ;-)
- ars 16y agoThe story is cool, but not actually possible in real life (there's just not enough ink): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Science/2011_January_10#Hiding_gold_in_ink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archiv...
- m_myers 16y agoMonk lied to me? Are you saying Monk lied to me?
- oiuyhtgyhuj 16y agoWhat was the James Bond movie where they did that 40years ago - called ???
- samwillis 16y agoGoldfinger
- oiuyhtgyhuj 16y ago
- coldarchon 16y agoas a german I'm a bit disturbed they didn't call it Nazi-Germany in the text. And the nazis tried to get any gold for foreign exchange, even from gold teeth of jews they executed, so I have some doubts about this story ..
- arst 16y agoas a german I'm a bit disturbed they didn't call it Nazi-Germany in the text. Why do you find this disturbing?
- sethg 16y agoThe text mentions World War II, so it’s clear from context who was running Germany at the time. Germany was still Germany during the Holocaust, just as the United States was still the United States when it was committing genocide against Native Americans, Belgium was still Belgium when it was responsible for atrocities in the Congo, etc., etc.
- moultano 16y ago>Belgium was still Belgium when it was responsible for atrocities in the Congo, etc., etc. Funny you should mention that, because at the time that the atrocities were occurring, the Congo was not a Belgian colony. Rather it was the personal colony of King Leopold of Belgium and was handed over to the parliamentary government of Belgium after the atrocities came to light.
- itswindy 16y ago"L'État, c'est moi"
- ddfisher 16y agoThe most recent edit to the article prepended "Nazi" to "Germany" and contributed nothing further. This seems rather unnecessary, as the sentence clearly specifies that this occurred during WWII. Did you make this change?
- mkramlich 16y agoIf this hadn't happened in real life, it certainly would have happened in a Neal Stephenson novel.
- Create 16y agoAccording to other accounts, the trick was performed by Bohr himself. Turing only won silver supposedly ...I guess bronze went to cannon shells. http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/B.html http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/B.html http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Nies-Bohr/28076 http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Nies-Bohr/28076
- brandoniles 16y agoThat's a creative solution!
- blantonl 16y agoFor those that didn't get this immediately, here is the relevant component from Wikipedia: When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of the German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The Nazi government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after the jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.[5][6]
- monochromatic 16y agoOur AP chemistry teacher told us this story back in high school, and I have always loved it.