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Dissolve My Nobel Prize, Fast (2011)
- comrade1 11y agoPuts our current comfortable lives in perspective, the chemist and others destroying a Nobel medal to keep people alive. I guess the equivalent of risk these days is leaking information on illegal activities by your government. I suspect many HN readers would have turned them in.
- zxexz 11y agoI suspect you're getting downvoted for the last third of your comment. The first two thirds alone might have had the opposite effect.
- markcerqueira 11y agoThanks for the explanation. Couldn't for the life of me figure out why he was getting bad imaginary internet points!
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoYeah, the "if you're reading this, you probably would have collaborated with the Nazis" bit was a little jarring.
- vidarh 11y agoGiven the proportion of the populations of the occupied countries that ended up collaborating, I'd say that while it was an unnecessary statement, it's probably correct in a "given a sufficiently large set of people...." sense.
- madez 11y agoI also think it was correct. People don't like when you say them that they probably would have been a Nazi, too, if they had lived as a german in Germany at that time. Nevertheless, I think it's true and makes one thinking. It was a worthy comment because it was correct and controversial. Those are often the best.
- trimble-alum 11y agoYup, it came off as an insulting the audience, negative and paranoid.
- jsmthrowaway 11y agoIt makes no sense and there's no logic to it, either. The Third Reich very likely would have identified the HN audience as a threat and acted accordingly, because information is extremely powerful and damaging to such a regime. There's a school of thought that suggests the exact same situation with Nazi Germany would not be possible today, due to the wide dissemination of information. (I don't know if that's true, but I've heard it said.) With strong cryptography, the private intelligence many of our databases contain (imagine what could be learned from Facebook's databases), and the abilities to both be dangerous from any location with Internet access and to trivially conceal that very same location, a totalitarian regime would very likely not be friendly or collaborative with the typical HN reader. Few realize just what kind of power this skill set provides because they've never had to leverage it in such a situation and it hasn't crossed their minds. I know that sounds silly and self-aggrandizing, but think about it for a few minutes.
- cmsmith 11y agoThis is a bit of a Godwin's switcheroo - where in a historical discussion about Nazis someone will inevitably try to use it to win points in a modern political argument.
- monochromatic 11y agoI remember hearing this story from my high school chemistry teacher. I've always liked it.
- pg_is_a_butt 11y agoyup, me too. we went a step further and used a reaction with copper to create a thin layer of gold on the surface, then dissolved the gold, then extracted the dissolved gold. the teacher did a spiel about keeping it secret and how we would all be millionaires, then we did the math at how the .000001 gram of gold (or whatever it was... probably less than that) was worth almost nothing compared to the cost of expended chemicals. oh well.. off to history class.
- noonespecial 11y agoWhoa. That's heavy. The beaker, I mean. That must have been a very heavy beaker of solution!
- raldi 11y ago"The average Nobel Prize medal is 175g" http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/watson-james-dewey-nobel-prize-medal-in-5857953-details.aspx http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/watson-... (That's about $7000 worth.)
- kijin 11y agoSo, about the weight of a phablet like Galaxy Note 4. That's heavy, but not too heavy to be noticeable in a large flask containing an unknown liquid of unknown density. And since the flask survived, the Nazis probably knew not to mess with flasks of unknown chemicals.
- barsonme 11y agoDoes anybody have an idea on how long dissolving a piece of gold that long would take? The article says it's a very slow task, yet makes it seem as if Niels Bohr was able to do it in minutes (or a little longer). E.g., "...physicist Niels Bohr has just hours, maybe minutes, to make two Nobel Prize medals disappear."
- corin_ 11y agoI think that line was written for dramatic purposes to indicate that he didn't know how long it would take for the Nazis to show up so he had to be as quick as possible. It doesn't necessarily imply that it didn't take him hours and hours. (But I've no idea what the answer to your question is.)
- dman 11y agoTheres only one way to find out - win a nobel prize and dissolve it.
- dalke 11y agoTwo ways - they are sometimes for sale.
- dkbrk 11y agoThough I don't know any more details about the events that took place, there are several ways of speeding up the process. As 23kt gold is quite soft, it would be a quite straightforward process to finely divide it and thereby increase the reaction surface area. Additionally, you could (gently!) heat the solution, though at the cost of a more copious amount of nasty fumes.
- SteveGerencser 11y agoWe did this when I was a jeweler years ago and the process happens very quickly, it is literally minutes so I would assume that at worst they are looking a a 5 to 10 minute window to dissolve one medal. The real issue is that the gasses given off are lethal and if not done carefully in a very well ventilated location you can do serious harm to yourself and anyone nearby. They would have known this and been fine, but someone just reading the article and thinking, hey, I have gold and some acid laying around let's see what happens, could end up dead. The gas given off is Nitric Oxide (which combines with Oxygen in the air to create Nitrogen Dioxide) and Chlorine and even a small dose can cause serious damage to your lungs if not be fatal.
- jevinskie 11y agoI wonder what the yield was. How much mass was lost between the original medals and the recreated medals?
- madez 11y agoDissolved gold doesn't evaporate. So, unless you spill the liquid, you should get virtually everything back.
- lvs 11y agoNone. Both the oxidation and reduction are quantitative.
- monochromatic 11y agoNothing gives 100% yield.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- blakecaldwell 11y ago"This was not an obvious solution"
- lxe 11y agoI love reading this kind of stuff on HN.
- joe5150 11y agoKnut Hamsun got rid of his Nobel Prize by giving it as a gift to Joseph Goebbels. It takes all kinds.
- acqq 11y agoFor those who didn't know, also an interesting story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun "In 1943, he sent Germany’s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a gift. His biographer Thorkild Hansen interpreted this as part of the strategy to get an audience with Hitler.[24] Hamsun was eventually invited to meet with Hitler; during the meeting, he complained about the German civilian administrator in Norway, Josef Terboven, and asked that imprisoned Norwegian citizens be released, enraging Hitler.[25] Otto Dietrich describes the meeting in his memoirs as the only time that another person was able to get a word in edgeways with Hitler. He attributes the cause to Hamsun's deafness. Regardless, Dietrich notes that it took Hitler three days to get over his anger.[26]" "Nevertheless, a week after Hitler's death, Hamsun wrote a eulogy for him, saying “He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.”[22] Following the end of the war, angry crowds burned his books in public in major Norwegian cities and Hamsun was confined for several months in a psychiatric hospital."
- comrh 11y agoI'm pretty glad I read the comments on this one: Pastafaarian • 4 years ago "So, it takes the possibility of death in order to get a physicist to use applied chemistry." 58 •Share
- vacri 11y agoDoing an undergraduate applied science degree, one of my lecturers taught me the phrase "In theory, there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is."
- new299 11y ago"The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory" is my favorite version.
- evanb 11y agoHe was quoting Yogi Berra.
- juliangregorian 11y agoMaybe. Wikiquote says the attribution came later: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jan_L._A._van_de_Snepscheut http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jan_L._A._van_de_Snepscheut
- marc13 11y agowki
- yyhhsj0521 11y agoWhy not simply melt it?
- scott_karana 11y agoBecause a lump of gold would still be confiscated... Still, they wouldn't be implicated for the Nobels at least.
- ekianjo 11y agoAll good, but why did they not use Mercury to dissolve Gold instead ? It's almost instantaneous, and it used to be commonly used for Gold extraction by the mining industry (until they replaced it for safety reasons by other materials).
- entee 11y agoGold and mercury form an amalgam, so you would still have had something that looks like a big hunk of metal. I suppose you wouldn't have known whose gold that was, but the fact that you had a large chunk of gold-mercury amalgam in the lab would have been not so good. Edit: Looking at some videos, it appears you could get something that looks like regular mercury. I'm wondering how much mercury you would have needed to solubilize a medal. They may also not have had that much on hand, HCl and nitric acid are way easier to find.
- ekianjo 11y ago> Gold and mercury form an amalgam Sure, but if you have a sufficient amount of mercury, that amalgam will remain invisible to the eye as Mercury is not translucent - and you can just write "mercury" on the flash and you can be sure no-one will dare to touch it.
- vacri 11y agoWWII-era soldiers may not have been as fearful of the fun that is mercury as we are today.
- Crito 11y ago> you can just write "mercury" on the flash and you can be sure no-one will dare to touch it. Remember we're talking about 1940. Whoever discovered it might very well take it off the shelf to play with it. ;)
- ekianjo 11y agoOh, Mercury poisoning has been known for a very, very long time, and certainly well documented since the late 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning
- galago 11y agoThis is an example of actual events that are far more interesting than most WWII movies. I fear that scientists today just aren't that cool. That said, I'm not sure I would want to face similar calamity.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoI prefer to think that we live in times that are less interesting (in the Chinese proverb sense) and that demand less derring-do and intrigue of our scientists. I'm sure that if a portal opened up and parallel-universe-Nazis-lizards (or whatever) began to invade, we'd see just as much heroism and inventiveness from everyone.
- trimble-alum 11y agoMovies are movies. but you can't know or prove that, even if you happen to believe it.
- ekianjo 11y ago> I fear that scientists today just aren't that cool. That's a nice story, but there's nothing really in it that would justify it to be "cooler" than anything else. I find the history of actual inventions or discoveries much cooler than war anecdotes.
- xkcd-sucks 11y agoMost stuff that's "cool" to a general audience is illegal, prohibited in the name of "safety," or so far outside one's job description as to comprise some ethical violation (which are roughly equivalent to Catholic sins). So, we don't talk very much to outsiders, or impose a cooling-off period of several years/several jobs before talking.
- trimble-alum 11y agoIt is more apropos to use chemistry to hide Nobel medals than say hide them in the walls. Any mention as to how the lanyards were disposed (acid)?
- userbinator 11y agoThe gold medals themselves were the problem, not their lanyards.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoBut a sensible point - you don't want to go to all that trouble and then have a Nazi Officer holding up a lanyard saying "Nobel Institue" that he found in the bin at the back of the lab. But I think a regular fire would do.
- trimble-alum 11y agoEasy to debate unknown, but they already went to the trouble of dissolving gold in acid instead of mercury. If it were me, I would place the the ribbon and all in the solution.
- neurocis 11y agoSpiderman would be envious.
- madvoid 11y agoIs this the thread you were looking for? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501780
- stretchwithme 11y agoIsn't gold supposed to be soft? Can't you pound it with a hammer? Maybe it wasn't pure gold. In the Italian Job, the thief of thieves fenced the gold bars, but was discovered because of the image of the lady printed on each one. Bet that'd be easy to pound out.
- nitrogen 11y agoIn the case of a stamped image, a pounded dull spot where an image used to be might look more suspicious.
- kijin 11y agoThe medals were 23K, so about 95.8% gold. But even if you could pound them into unidentifiable blobs, how would you keep them safe? The Germans weren't looking for medals in particular, they would have taken anything made of Au. "No gold shall leave Germany", etc. etc.
- dghf 11y agoBut without the identifying marks, how would they know where they had come from or who had sent them? Wasn't the overriding concern the protection of the two Laureates?
- acqq 11y agoI also think hammering the medals would have been a good and fast first step to take to make them unidentifiable. However the gold still looks like gold and it would have been confiscated. Their goal was also to hide it in plain sight. As mentioned in the article, they were sure that even burying gold somewhere wouldn't help.
- WaxProlix 11y ago> The Nazis have declared no gold shall leave Germany, but two Nobel laureates, one of Jewish descent, the other an opponent of the National Socialists, have quietly sent their medals to Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics, for protection. Does it bother anyone else when despotic regimes get called by their chosen monikers (unironically)? Why do we pay this homage to the National Socialists with tongues firmly out of cheek when our distaste for the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea (for instance) is unilaterally considered standard? Unapologetic neoliberalism, I guess, but some slightly less biased verbiage in NPR would be nice to see.
- madez 11y agoDon't worry about the down-votes. Some misuse the possibility to down-vote to express disagreement with your opinion or when they feel insulted. They didn't internalize freedom of speech or use HN like reddit.
- WaxProlix 11y agoYeah wow, folks hated that post. Some comments would have been nice.
- madez 11y agoSee? Now it hit my comment as well. These down-votes of constructive comments without constructive criticism are to press one into alignment. I consider that harmful for critical and controversial thought.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoI do try to explain downvotes when requested, so here we go: I'm downvoting you for trotting out the tired old "anyone who disagrees with me is an enemy of free speech" silliness. I'm curious what you think downvotes should legitimately be used for, if not to criticize patently ridiculous statements (like "calling things by their names is a gesture of respect, if you disagree you must be some sort of LIBERAL"). As a side note, are you implying that Redditors don't downvote when they disagree or feel insulted? Because wow. Have you been to Reddit?
- InclinedPlane 11y agoHere's what dissolving a gold coin in aqua regia looks like, this is about 1/200th of the weight of the 2 Nobel prize medallions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoqU1GfIOkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoqU1GfIOkI
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]