Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Applied Chemistry

From NPR, a tale of disolving two Nobel prizes:

Niels Bohr story


I think it would have been easier to electro-plate the gold onto a substrait, then plate silver over it. (after all mirrors in a physics lab are pretty innocuous), regardless it was a clever way to hide the gold.

I still prefer the "heavy water in the beer bottle" story though.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, according to the story, the clock was ticking. Electroplating wouldn't have been nearly as fast as aqua regia. It's also less dangerous in a situation like that.

Mark Horning said...

Electroplating speed is proportional to the current...