(no subject)
Aug. 5th, 2005 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynNot much happening today. Linux 2.4 is still acting up-somehow. Physical memory keeps cycling on us...
Anyway, because there is currently no demand whatsoever for it, I am going to start writing up the basics of what I do on my LJ, simply because I've got to get it straight for myself. I will try to hold it down to the layman level though. Besides, I don't have much else to write about.
I will try not to make it too boring.
In the beginning there were atoms, and atoms were good.
At least, that's how it was to the Greeks. Now, keep in mind that the Greeks were the guys who were running around half-naked, getting into trouble with teenage boys, stabbing each other with spears, and being philosophical in their spare time. It was a much simpler age, in which if you wanted to take someone else's land you simply built a giant wooden horse and rolled it up to their gates. So atoms, the building blocks of all matter, were a fairly simple answer to the complicated question "What are we?" that allowed the philosophers to go back to their investigation of the merits of wine.
This continued for a long time, because, and let's be honest, nobody was really enthused about tiny little particles that were too small to see. First there were the dark ages, where people were too busy dying to worry about it. Then there was the Renaissance when people were too busy stealing money from each other and giving it to artists to worry about it. Then there was Reformation and the Enlightenment and the Age of Napoleon and the Georgian era and the Romanov era and the age of David Smith (13 if you're curious) and a whole bunch of different ages and eras rolled around until the historians collectively threatened to commit suicide if history didn't get its act together.
So finally we got to the beginnings of the "modern" age (which has ended by the way; from now on we only go backwards). In 1897 a scientist named J.J. Thompson managed to discover the first of what we call sub-atomic particles, the electron. He discovered that he could create a beam of something that was very small, very light, and had a negative charge. Since atoms themselves are not charged (or else we would do weird things in the presence of an electric field), it was obvious that he had discovered something that was not an atom. Further analysis gave rise to the electron.
Thompson, like all physicists, immediately formulated a theory that was absolutely, totally and completely wrong. The only thing that it got right was that atoms were not "indivisible", but were actually made up of a whole bunch of crap. Thompson came up with the much reviled "plum pudding" model, in which he hypothesized that the electrons were distributed within a heavy, positively charged paste-like substance. This was a reasonable explanation except for the fact that it was totally and completely wrong.
He got beaten out by a scientist named Rutherford, who managed to perform another experiment involving shooting other particles, positively charged ones, at gold foil. I don't know how he got gold foil. I suspect that grant restrictions were a lot lighter in those days. Anyway, Rutherford managed to convince the rest of the world that most of an atom was actually composed of what we now call "empty space" because there's nothing in it (sort of like central Nevada). Furthermore there was this big heavy thing in the center that had almost all the mass of the atom, and a lot of positive charge. Hence was born the nucleus.
Hmm...but wait. If we suppose that the nucleus is also made out of particles, heavy positively charged ones, how do we deal with the fact that Helium is four times as heavy as hydrogen, but only twice the charge? Obviously someone had to invent the neutrons, which is what Chadwick did by the simple expedient of googling it to see what the hell it actually was. So now we're down to the basic model of the atom that you probably got 1.6 million times in Middle School science class: in the middle of an atom there's a positively charged nucleus that contains most of the atom's mass. The nucleus is made up of two types of heavy particles, positively charged protons and neutral neutrons, both of which just mostly sit there. Some people call these particles nucleons, but I will probably refer to them as either baryons or hadrons, for reasons yet to be revealed. Around this heavy middle zoom negatively charged, low-mass, high-caffeine electrons; they're the things that make up most of the structure of the atom.
So this looks like a fairly self-consistent model to me-except for one problem. By the time we discover the neutron in 1932, somebody's already screwed everything up.
Our antagonist is a mad scientist of the classic sort, frazzled white hair, occasional social problems, and the dedication to spend many months locked away in a room staring at equations. Unfortunately he never quite had the mindset required of an evil mastermind, and he instead had to make his living as a patent clerk in Switzerland.
In 1905, our antagonist, a man by the name of Albert Einstein, shamed the rest of the physics community by coming up with more brilliant, breath-taking, awe-inspiring and all around revolutionary ideas than the entire rest of the physics community could do in a lifetime-and then having the gall to publish it all in one year. This makes graduate students disgruntled; we can't even be looked at as the next genius unless we manage to come up with not one, but four revolutionary ideas in one year. But I digress. Anyway Einstein, having little else to do, decided to get on with it and invent modern physics.
The part that's important to our story is the development of the Photoelectric effect. The basic idea of this is that if light strikes metal, it can excite an electron to break off of an atom, thus allowing you to create electric current. What blew the world away, and the issue that was not settled until Compton came along in 1923, was the fact that Einstein was suggesting that light was quantized. That is there was some particle, which we call the photon, that carried light energy around, and it could only have certain values. Obviously physicists called Einstein a nutcase, but we excuse this by saying that a great many of them were theorists and hence don't count.
By this time, of course, it was well known that light behaved like a wave. The melding of these two theories is the subject of Quantum Mechanics, and took several years to get perfectly right. At this point let's just skip to what we all know to be true, Einstein was right, his science was correct, and there is a small particle known as a photon that is basically the closest thing to pure energy that you can get. The damn thing zips around like a rocketship in a bumper car arena, smashing into all kinds of things and wreaking subatomic havoc. This annoys physicists.
So now we have four fundamental particles, the baryons (the proton and the neutron), the electron, and the massless photon.
Which leaves the universe with one very good question: if like charges repel, what the hell keeps the nucleus together?
To Be Continued...
Anyway, because there is currently no demand whatsoever for it, I am going to start writing up the basics of what I do on my LJ, simply because I've got to get it straight for myself. I will try to hold it down to the layman level though. Besides, I don't have much else to write about.
I will try not to make it too boring.
In the beginning there were atoms, and atoms were good.
At least, that's how it was to the Greeks. Now, keep in mind that the Greeks were the guys who were running around half-naked, getting into trouble with teenage boys, stabbing each other with spears, and being philosophical in their spare time. It was a much simpler age, in which if you wanted to take someone else's land you simply built a giant wooden horse and rolled it up to their gates. So atoms, the building blocks of all matter, were a fairly simple answer to the complicated question "What are we?" that allowed the philosophers to go back to their investigation of the merits of wine.
This continued for a long time, because, and let's be honest, nobody was really enthused about tiny little particles that were too small to see. First there were the dark ages, where people were too busy dying to worry about it. Then there was the Renaissance when people were too busy stealing money from each other and giving it to artists to worry about it. Then there was Reformation and the Enlightenment and the Age of Napoleon and the Georgian era and the Romanov era and the age of David Smith (13 if you're curious) and a whole bunch of different ages and eras rolled around until the historians collectively threatened to commit suicide if history didn't get its act together.
So finally we got to the beginnings of the "modern" age (which has ended by the way; from now on we only go backwards). In 1897 a scientist named J.J. Thompson managed to discover the first of what we call sub-atomic particles, the electron. He discovered that he could create a beam of something that was very small, very light, and had a negative charge. Since atoms themselves are not charged (or else we would do weird things in the presence of an electric field), it was obvious that he had discovered something that was not an atom. Further analysis gave rise to the electron.
Thompson, like all physicists, immediately formulated a theory that was absolutely, totally and completely wrong. The only thing that it got right was that atoms were not "indivisible", but were actually made up of a whole bunch of crap. Thompson came up with the much reviled "plum pudding" model, in which he hypothesized that the electrons were distributed within a heavy, positively charged paste-like substance. This was a reasonable explanation except for the fact that it was totally and completely wrong.
He got beaten out by a scientist named Rutherford, who managed to perform another experiment involving shooting other particles, positively charged ones, at gold foil. I don't know how he got gold foil. I suspect that grant restrictions were a lot lighter in those days. Anyway, Rutherford managed to convince the rest of the world that most of an atom was actually composed of what we now call "empty space" because there's nothing in it (sort of like central Nevada). Furthermore there was this big heavy thing in the center that had almost all the mass of the atom, and a lot of positive charge. Hence was born the nucleus.
Hmm...but wait. If we suppose that the nucleus is also made out of particles, heavy positively charged ones, how do we deal with the fact that Helium is four times as heavy as hydrogen, but only twice the charge? Obviously someone had to invent the neutrons, which is what Chadwick did by the simple expedient of googling it to see what the hell it actually was. So now we're down to the basic model of the atom that you probably got 1.6 million times in Middle School science class: in the middle of an atom there's a positively charged nucleus that contains most of the atom's mass. The nucleus is made up of two types of heavy particles, positively charged protons and neutral neutrons, both of which just mostly sit there. Some people call these particles nucleons, but I will probably refer to them as either baryons or hadrons, for reasons yet to be revealed. Around this heavy middle zoom negatively charged, low-mass, high-caffeine electrons; they're the things that make up most of the structure of the atom.
So this looks like a fairly self-consistent model to me-except for one problem. By the time we discover the neutron in 1932, somebody's already screwed everything up.
Our antagonist is a mad scientist of the classic sort, frazzled white hair, occasional social problems, and the dedication to spend many months locked away in a room staring at equations. Unfortunately he never quite had the mindset required of an evil mastermind, and he instead had to make his living as a patent clerk in Switzerland.
In 1905, our antagonist, a man by the name of Albert Einstein, shamed the rest of the physics community by coming up with more brilliant, breath-taking, awe-inspiring and all around revolutionary ideas than the entire rest of the physics community could do in a lifetime-and then having the gall to publish it all in one year. This makes graduate students disgruntled; we can't even be looked at as the next genius unless we manage to come up with not one, but four revolutionary ideas in one year. But I digress. Anyway Einstein, having little else to do, decided to get on with it and invent modern physics.
The part that's important to our story is the development of the Photoelectric effect. The basic idea of this is that if light strikes metal, it can excite an electron to break off of an atom, thus allowing you to create electric current. What blew the world away, and the issue that was not settled until Compton came along in 1923, was the fact that Einstein was suggesting that light was quantized. That is there was some particle, which we call the photon, that carried light energy around, and it could only have certain values. Obviously physicists called Einstein a nutcase, but we excuse this by saying that a great many of them were theorists and hence don't count.
By this time, of course, it was well known that light behaved like a wave. The melding of these two theories is the subject of Quantum Mechanics, and took several years to get perfectly right. At this point let's just skip to what we all know to be true, Einstein was right, his science was correct, and there is a small particle known as a photon that is basically the closest thing to pure energy that you can get. The damn thing zips around like a rocketship in a bumper car arena, smashing into all kinds of things and wreaking subatomic havoc. This annoys physicists.
So now we have four fundamental particles, the baryons (the proton and the neutron), the electron, and the massless photon.
Which leaves the universe with one very good question: if like charges repel, what the hell keeps the nucleus together?
To Be Continued...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 06:10 am (UTC)*giggles* You're hysterical, you know that? I can't wait to read the rest of this.
Central Nevada, indeed. *snort*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 07:42 am (UTC)Anyway, I don't believe in atoms. I believe in... monads! *waves Leibniz's Monadology*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 02:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 08:02 pm (UTC)May I print this out for some of my friends who need physics education?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 10:06 pm (UTC)Although most of it is basically taken from the first chapter of Griffiths's Introduction to Elementary Particles. With some stuff added as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-07 03:01 pm (UTC)Word. Scholars everywhere resign their history-classes after the topic of the Industrial Revolution (and all of its Industrial ickyness) is finished and we enter the 20th century.
Anyway, I agree with it. I don't think I got it all, yet, and will have to read over it, but I agree with it.
...what do you mean "it ended in a question"?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-08 12:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-08 08:47 am (UTC)I'm sorry. It's not the most clear and welladjusted style of writing.