The Hindu Business Line : Golden stories of the Nobel medals

Search for `Nobel', `Phelps' and `gold', and Google News responds with 10 finds in `0.11 seconds'. The common refrain of these reports is about how a Nobel Prize comprises a gold medal and a cash award of nearly $1.4 million, apart from a citation. A prestigious recognition, this is, though delayed by decades, for the work done by Edmund S. Phelps in economics.

For the curious, it may help to know that the medals weigh approximately 200 gm, and have a diameter of 66 mm, as http://nobelprize.org informs. Up to 1980, they were made of 23-karat gold; thereafter, `18-karat green gold plated with 24-karat gold', says the site of the Nobel Foundation.

"On all `Swedish' Nobel medals the name of the laureate is engraved fully visible on a plate on the reverse." These are the ones given for `physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and literature'. In the medals for peace and economics, the winner's name `is engraved on the edge of the medal, which is less obvious', states the Foundation. And this created `problems' for the 1975 economics laureates, `the Russian Leonid Kantorovich and the American Tjalling Koopmans.'

What problems? "Their medals were mixed up in Stockholm, and after the Nobel Week the prize winners went back to their respective countries with the wrong medals. As this happened during the Cold War, it took four years of diplomatic efforts to have the medals exchanged to their rightful owners."

Of interest, again, is the story on the site about `what happened to the Nobel medals of three Nobel laureates in physics during World War II: the medals of the Germans Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925), and of the Dane Niels Bohr (1922).' Bohr, as you can recollect, with some help from Wikipedia, "made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics."

Professor Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen was a refuge for German Jewish physicists, including von Laue and James Franck who had deposited their medals there `to keep them from being confiscated by the German authorities'. Hitler occupied Denmark in April 1940, and Bohr's first worry was the safety of medals.

"In Hitler's Germany it was almost a capital offence to send gold out of the country. Since the names of the laureates were engraved on the medals, their discovery by the invading forces would have had very serious consequences," explains the Nobel Foundation. Yet, when `the Nazis occupied Bohr's Institute and searched it very carefully' they found nothing.

How so? Were the medals kept buried? No, Bohr had objected to that ruse, fearing that they could be unearthed. Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy (also of Jewish origin and a 1943 Nobel laureate in chemistry), who was then working at the Institute, found a solution.

"While the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving von Laue's and also Franck's medals," he wrote in `Adventures in Radioisotope Research', published in 1962.

Dissolving the medals was not easy, he would recount. For, gold is "exceedingly unreactive and difficult to dissolve." Thus, the solution was, literally, a solution. "The medals quietly waited out the war in a solution of aqua regia." After the war, the gold was recovered from the solution and the Foundation presented von Laue and Frank with the `recoined' Nobel medals.

Of greater interest to the economics-avid should be one of the early works of Phelps - `Models of Technical Progress and the Golden Rule of Research,' published on October 16, 1964. A 27-page document that you can unearth from http://ideas.repec.org.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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Golden stories of the Nobel medals

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