Dissolve My Nobel Prize, Fast (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Dissolve My Nobel Prize, Fast (2011)

npr.org

462 pointsanacleto81 comments

I'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

Doing 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."

He was quoting Yogi Berra.

Maybe. Wikiquote says the attribution came later: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jan_L._A._van_de_Snepscheut

"The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory" is my favorite version.

wki

All 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).

Gold 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.

> 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.

WWII-era soldiers may not have been as fearful of the fun that is mercury as we are today.

> 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. ;)

Oh, 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

And yet my parents (both born in the 1960's) both played with beads of mercury on their desks in school on numerous occasions... It was pretty common

Sure, I'm not saying the general knowledge of mercury poisoning was commonplace back then, but in the scientific community it was, I believe, well known already.

It was the Nazi soldier community they were worried about.

When I was at school (1980s) the teacher had us line up and put our fingers in a flask of mercury. It was a very peculiar sensation. I probably wouldn't want to repeat that "experiment" today.

Mercury poisoning has been known for some time, however people in the general public knowing or caring about mercury poisoning is a pretty recent phenomenon.

> They may also not have had that much on hand, HCl and nitric acid are way easier to find.

At the same time, Mercury use was way more widespread than now in laboratories, so it may have been readily available as well. A number of things were banned or heavily restricted for laboratory use in relatively recent history (80s~90s).

Presumably a yellow liquid is far less conspicuous than a shiny metallic liquid, and both acids are commonly stocked. I think it's easy to forget that obtaining chemicals on short notice was not always easy (especially not in a country that's just been invaded).

I did not know you could dissolve gold in mercury, pretty cool. After a little research, I found out that the process can also be reversed (obviously, since it's used for gold extraction), like it was with aqua regia to recover the dissolved medals' gold, by simply evaporating the mercury (since it's boiling point is much lower than gold's):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgam_(chemistry)#Gold_extrac...

http://nevada-outback-gems.com/Reference_pages/Amalgamation....

This however, has to be done in a controlled manner due to the toxicity of mercury, which is also why mercury apparently isn't commonly used to extract gold anymore.

> This however, has to be done in a controlled manner due to the toxicity of mercury, which is also why mercury apparently isn't commonly used to extract gold anymore.

Yes, because mercury vapors can directly transfer to your brain once inhaled and cause neurotoxic damage.

> why mercury apparently isn't commonly used to extract gold anymore.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Out of sight out of mind. But maybe not out of your personal electronics.

You can also dissolve gold in lead, as my great-uncle discovered when he thought he'd hidden his money somewhere safe when a UK Nazi invasion seemed imminent during the second world war...

Knut Hamsun got rid of his Nobel Prize by giving it as a gift to Joseph Goebbels. It takes all kinds.

For those who didn't know, also an interesting story:

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."

Whoa. That's heavy.

The beaker, I mean. That must have been a very heavy beaker of solution!

"The average Nobel Prize medal is 175g"

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/watson-...

(That's about $7000 worth.)

So, 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.

I wonder what the yield was. How much mass was lost between the original medals and the recreated medals?

Dissolved gold doesn't evaporate. So, unless you spill the liquid, you should get virtually everything back.

None. Both the oxidation and reduction are quantitative.

Nothing gives 100% yield.

Does 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."

I 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.)

Theres only one way to find out - win a nobel prize and dissolve it.

Two ways - they are sometimes for sale.

Though 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.

We 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.

I would imagine that anyone who just happens to have some nitric acid (or any strong acid of appreciable quantity and concentration) lying around would have the sense to at least Google the products of the reaction, if they didn't know offhand. Other than that, gold doesn't react with terribly much anyway, does it?

Very interesting, thank you for the answer.

I love how diverse HN can be. From Ph.Ds in computer science to former jewelers, there seems to be a little bit of everything.

Follow up question: would the gas have stuck around until the Nazis arrived a while (hours or less?) later? Or would their ventilation have dispersed it enough?

I remember in the science classes I took in HS the ventilation hoods pretty much removed most of the fumes, but we also never worked with anything that was particularly... pungent? My last science class was probably 5 years ago, so that's my level of understanding.

Fume cupboards work pretty well. If you leave the fan running I think all the airflow is in and up the chimney. I presume Bohr would have used one.

(Just got side tracked reading about old style fume cupboards http://www.cf.ac.uk/estat/sustainability/initiatives/ )

I love reading this kind of stuff on HN.

This 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.

I 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.

Movies are movies. but you can't know or prove that, even if you happen to believe it.

> 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.

Most 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.

Isn'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.

In the case of a stamped image, a pounded dull spot where an image used to be might look more suspicious.

The 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.

But 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?

I 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.

It 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)?

The gold medals themselves were the problem, not their lanyards.

But 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.

Easy 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.

Here'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

I remember hearing this story from my high school chemistry teacher. I've always liked it.

Why not simply melt it?

Because a lump of gold would still be confiscated...

Still, they wouldn't be implicated for the Nobels at least.

"This was not an obvious solution"

Puts 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.

I suspect you're getting downvoted for the last third of your comment. The first two thirds alone might have had the opposite effect.

Thanks for the explanation. Couldn't for the life of me figure out why he was getting bad imaginary internet points!

Yeah, the "if you're reading this, you probably would have collaborated with the Nazis" bit was a little jarring.

Yup, it came off as an insulting the audience, negative and paranoid.

It 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.

Given 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.

I 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.

This 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.

Spiderman would be envious.

Is this the thread you were looking for? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501780

> 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.

Don'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.

Yeah wow, folks hated that post. Some comments would have been nice.

See? 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.

I 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?

    I 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 think you misread me.

I never said, nor implicated nor thought that disagreeing is incompatible with free speech; quite the opposite.

I was talking about people abusing downvoting to express disagreement or feeling insulted.

Maybe you should read more carefully before presuming others wrote something silly.

    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").

I have no finished list of things which downvotes should be used for.

However, trolling and trying to derail a serious discussion are part of that list.

Patently ridiculous statements can be downvoted, but I suggest to error on the side of doubt when judging whether it's patently or not. Also, if the statement in question was serious, a comment why it's ridiculous is appropriate.

Disagreement is definitely not part of that list. Because it blocks controversial discussion even when they are serious and rational.

    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?

I think you misunderstood again.

On reddit exactly what you described happens all the time, and HN should be different in this point.

> "calling things by their names is a gesture of respect, if you disagree you must be some sort of LIBERAL"

I'm a bit confused as to how you got this from my original comment; surely using a chosen name rather than an externally imposed epithet or handle is a sign of respect, or at least not disrespect?

I think there's a miscommunication about the liberal thing. I meant it in terms of classical liberalism (a prizing of individual rights over other concerns, for instance, is a central tenet of this; it doesn't mesh well with most varieties of socialism), not in the USA-specific sense of "liberals" vs "conservatives".

I'm baffled. What should we call them? "National Socialist" is apparently out, and "Nazi" is just an abbreviation of that ("Nationalsozialismus" in German). That doesn't leave much that will be commonly understood. I suppose we could have the UN call some sort of international symposium to officially rename then "Fascist Poopyheads," but that's going to cost a lot in reprinted textbooks.

I guess I don't understand why you think calling things by their names is a mark of respect. It's just...how communication works. Your other example doesn't make much sense either, since North Korea is called "DPRK" fairly frequently in news and discussion. And then apparently calling things by their names is a mark of "liberalism"? What?

So that's why I'm downvoting you, since you wanted to know. I hope you find this information helpful.

I do, thanks - I would say Nazi, I suppose. It's the common term, and is fairly divorced from its roots as far as I'm aware. There's been a push to call groups like ISIS Daesh or ISIL or just IS, and refusing to actually spell out the moniker for "DPRK" might also fall under the umbrella of not acknowledging regimes' grandiose claims about themselves.

I guess another part of my complaint is that they weren't socialist at all (after 1920-something, when the small group of socialist thinkers in the party were forced out), so it's a misnomer. It leads to misinformation, and I don't really like that on principle.

The liberal comment was because, in general, liberals (and neoliberals, etc) tend to dislike socialism and so often take the chance to associate or equate it with fascism, social democracy, hegemony, etc.

Thanks for taking the time, even with the snark it's enlightening to see where folks are coming from. I appreciate it.

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