George de Hevesy to a Flask of Chloroauric Acid

Daniel Galef

CN: Poem mentions death; historical context of WWII

In 1940 scientist George De Hevesy dissolved two Nobel prize medals to keep them out of Nazi hands.

Dissolve, bright gold! Unshackle, atoms! Break
your bonds, and melt away within my flask.
Destruction is, like death, a facile task,
like entropy itself. All things un-make
and few, once gone, admit reconstitution.
The honor is destroyed. The form is lost.
No matter. There’s no action without cost,
without re-action. No perfect solution.
O spirits of salt and niter, like Glendower
I call to thee. What answer shall I find,
for Honor, or for Europe? For my mind?
Can these, too, be re-formed, and, by some power
the dissolution of the human soul
arrested, and a broken world made whole?

The Science

‘De Hevesy to a Flask of Chloroauric Acid’ is about the Hungarian chemist who hid the Nobel medals of James Franck and Max von Laue (two German physicists, one a Jew, and both opponents of fascism) from the Nazis in 1940. He achieved this by dissolving the medals in aqua regia. When gold is dissolved in aqua regia (HCl and HNO3) it produces the aqueous chemical Chloroauric acid (H[AuCl4]). The apparently worthless beaker of acid—all of the gold was still present, merely invisible—sat unnoticed on a shelf at the Bohr Institute for half a decade after the scientific refugees had fled, and it was still sitting there when they returned after the end of World War II. De Hevesy simply re-precipitated the gold out of solution, and the medals were re-cast and returned to their rightful owners.

The Poet

Daniel Galef’s first book is Imaginary Sonnets (Able Muse Press, 2023), a collection of persona poems each from the point of view of different historical figures, literary characters, and inanimate objects. Several of the poems relate to science and scientific history and have been published in Philosophy Now, Able Muse, Atlanta Review, Ars Medica, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, among others.

Next poem: Gifts of Disorder by Joan Waltermire