When it comes to SMBC jokes, one must be careful to distinguish between the satire, and the true situation that may as well have been satire.
Today’s case on George de Hevesy is one of those strange but true tales.
As Hevesy himself describes in Adventures in Radioisotope Research: The Collected Papers of George Hevesy in Two Volumes:
My work was interrupted for only one day during the enemy occupation of Denmark. When on the morning of Denmark’s occupation, I arrived in the laboratory, I found Bohr worrying about Max von Laue’s Nobel medal, which Laue had sent to Copenhagen for safe-keeping. In Hitler’s empire it was almost a capital offence to send gold out of the country, and, Laue’s name being engraved into the medal, the discovery of this by the invading forces would have had very serious consequences for him. (Three years later the invading army occupied Bohr’s institute.) I suggested that we should bury the medal, but Bohr did not like this idea as the medal might be unearthed. I decided to dissolve it. While the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving Laue’s and also James Frank’s medals. After the war, the gold was recovered and the Nobel Foundation generously presented Laue and Franck with new Nobel medals.
Aqua regia (Latin for “royal water”) is so named because it is able to dissolve the so-called royal metals which includes gold as the Hevesy story elucidates so well.
It is composed of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, which individually, would be as harmful to gold as water. Nitric acid oxidizes a tiny amount of gold, forming Au3+. Hydrochloric acid readily supply chloride ions (Cl-) that react with Au3+ to form chloraurate anions (AuCl4-). When gold ions are removed, more gold can then be oxidized, until we have a jar of greenish or brownish looking liquid that is good enough to befuddle Nazis.
Thanks to the fine folks at the University of Nottingham, you can watch the entire process on video explained by the most stereotypical-looking scientist in existence.
No word yet on the dollhouse.
