[HN Gopher] Dissolve My Nobel Prize Fast. It's 1940. The Nazis h...
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       Dissolve My Nobel Prize Fast. It's 1940. The Nazis have taken
       Copenhagen
        
       Author : samwillis
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2023-01-23 21:00 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
        
       | acuozzo wrote:
       | Obviously, these individuals are far more intelligent than
       | myself, but wouldn't it have been significantly faster to create
       | an amalgam with mercury?
       | 
       | IIRC, it doesn't look golden or valuable at all once complete.
        
         | sand500 wrote:
         | Getting the gold back is apparently as easy as heating up the
         | amalgam to vaporize the mercury. Maybe too easy for the Nazi to
         | do or maybe they left some mercury out as a decoy.
        
           | TSiege wrote:
           | It's probably that mercury is incredibly toxic. Heating up
           | the amalgam was done to create traditional gold gilding, but
           | it also left the tradesman with mercury poisoning and bit
           | insane to boot
        
         | colanderman wrote:
         | Wikipedia says gold must be ground to form an amalgam. Whereas,
         | dissolution presumably could proceed unattended if necessary.
         | 
         | Also, Hevesey was limited to materials on hand; a sufficient
         | quantity of mercury simply may not have been present in the
         | lab.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-23 23:02 UTC)