The Matter Of Everything
Suzie Sheehy 2023 West Slope Library 539.7 SHEEHY
1984 born Mildura, Victoria, Australia 2006 BS University of Melbourne 2010 PhD University of Oxford 2015 Royal Society University Research Fellow, Oxford
011 1895 Röntgen experiment generates X-rays across laboratory from cathode ray tube
- 014 images wife's hand
016 1897 J. J. Thompson
- 019 electron
020 Original experiment in Science Museum, London
021 Lewis Latimer carbon filament for Edison bulb
024 Brain X-Ray, injected air bubble 1919 until 1960s Godfrey Hounsfield X-ray computed tomography
029 physicist Ernest Rutherford
029 chemist Frederick Soddy
030 Rutherford gold foil experiment
- 039-40 large angle scattering of alphas by gold foil, dense small nucleus
032 Harriet Brooks, grad student from Ontario, detects "gas" (alpha/helium particles) from thorium
037 Ernest Marsden and Hans Geiger
043 Shroud of Turin medieval forgery
- 051 Independent of temperature, not classical
- 054 Planck quantum "act of desperation" to explain high frequency falloff of black body radiation
055-7 Robert Millikan tries and fails to disprove Einstein, paper 1916
- 058 Nobel Prizes 1921 Einstein, 1923 Millikan
061 Louis de Broglie wave properties of particles, Nobel Prize 1929
063 Davisson and Germer 1925 experiment, electrons on nickel form nanometer-wavelength interference patterns
063 Sandra Eibenberger 2013 10000 amu molecules form 500 femtometer-wavelength interference patterns
071 Griffith Observatory Cloud chamber, 1936 Alexander Langsdorf design
074 Victor Hess Cosmic Rays 1936 Nobel
075 Charles Wilson glass blower, cloud chamber, 1927 Nobel
- 079 Magnets, curve measures charge and energy
079 Dmitri Skobeltsyn 5 GeV cosmic rays
080 Carl Anderson Caltech cloud chamber, noisy expansion piston, 425 kW magnet
081 observed positrons predicted by Dirac
- 082 Pauli, Bohr, Heisenberg considered Dirac's antimatter nonsense
083 Blackett and Occhialini observe electron/positron pair production
083 "Anderson youngest physics Nobel" in 1936 at age 33 ... nope, William Lawrence Bragg in 1915 at age 25.
084 1935 Anderson and Neddermeyer observe muons on Pike's Peak
085 differ from Hideki Yukawa's predicted nucleus-binding pi mesons
085 nuclear emulsion plate better than cloud chamber
086 Marietta Blau
087 Bibha Chowdhuri discovers mesons with nuclear emulsion
089 1e18 cosmic rays strike every second, 1 GW; Sheeny silly calculation "3.6 billion kW every hour"
- actually, 1 cosmic ray is 1 nanojoule, 6 GeV ... not 80,000,000 GeV
089 cosmic rays make Carbon-14
090 Beryllium-10 (half life 1.4MY) ratio to stable ⁹Be dates ice cores and soil deposits
090 ca. 1955, Australian physicist E. P. George measures rock density above Snowy Hydro Guthega-Munyang tunnel with cosmic ray muons using a Geiger counter.
090 ca. 1966, Luis Alvarez ( Adventures of a Physicist, p230-236 ) measures muon density from the Belzoni Champer in the Second Pyramid of Chephren.
091 ScanPyramids Project finds void in Khufu's Pyramid
- 095 Violin teaser
- 097 Rutherford hypothesizes neutrons, proton-mass but uncharged
- 100 visual estimation of radioactive events prone to confirmation bias (observer overestimate)
101 1927: Ernest Walton proposes accelerating charged particles
101 Walton shares lab with Thomas Allibone and John Cockcroft
102 Cockcroft calculates alpha Coulomb barrier 10 million volts
104 George Gamow suggests tunneling means 5 MeV emission, 1 MeV sometimes penetrates, perhaps 300 KeV
106 Metrovick 1930 transformer, Walton rectifier
- disappointing results
- 109 Start work on 800KV machine 1932
- 109 Irene Curie and Frederic Joliot bombard beryllium with polonium sourced alphas, mistakenly assume gamma emission
110 Chadwick observes many 8 MeV alphas produced with 250 KeV protons bombarding Lithium 7
7.016003434 amu (Li₇) + 1.007276467 amu (p₁) - 2*4.002603254 amu (He₄) -> 0.018073393 amu = 16.835 MeV/c²