Announcements have been coming out of Sweden over the last few days, releasing the names of the most recent winners of the 2011 Nobel Prizes.
Three American born scientists – Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess – shared this year’s prize for Physics for their discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate.
Just like last year’s winner for an ultra-lite carbon, in addition to the publicity and the monetary prize the trio received, they also took home gold medallions.
It would be hard to imagine dissolving the prestigious one-of-a-kind gold medal, but that’s exactly what physicist Niels Bohr and chemist Georgy de Hevesy did in 1940 in Copenhagen in order to avoid getting in trouble with the Nazis. It was illegal to ship gold out of Germany at the time and a pair of Nobel laureates defied that mandate by sending their 23-karat gold medals to Bohr for safekeeping. Once Hitler’s army had invaded Denmark, the medals were no longer safe with Bohr. In fact they were incriminating evidence.
With Nazis patrolling in the neighborhood, Bohr and de Hevesy opted to dissolve the medals and hide them in plain sight. After a nerve-wracking afternoon, the gold eventually was dissolved. When the Nazis arrived at the lab, they ignored the flask filled with an orange-colored liquid.
After fleeing the country for his safety and then returning to Copenhagen after V-E Day, de Hevesy found the flask was still in the battered lab. He reversed the chemistry and reclaimed the gold, which he sent back to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. The Nobel Foundation then recast the precious metal back into the prizes using the original gold and re-presented them to the Nobel laureates who earned them previously.
Author Sam Kean has the full story of the dissolved Nobel medals and other stories in his book The Disappearing Spoon And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements.
