5/30/2016
Now just see how elegantly we exploit the atoms to our advantage.
Just one medical example for tonight.
This is another example why the atomic theory is not "just a theory";
the way most of us put it so derogatorily.
The atomic theory currently envisages the central nucleus to be surrounded by a cloud of electronic probability at certain energy levels.
These electrons if bombarded with an electromagnetic wave can absorb certain energy and leap to higher levels or shells.
At higher levels they lack stability and tend to Falk back to their original levels.
In doing so they emit the absorbed energy.
This released energy is always less than the absorbed energy following the critical law of conservation of energy.
Hence the wavelength of the reemitted energy is always longer than the absorbed energy (wavelength is inversely related to energy).
This phenomenon of energy release by the falling of excited electrons from higher unstable levels to lower stable levels is called:
1. Fluorescence if it happens immediately.
and...
2. Phosphorescence if it happens after a significant delay from the time of absorption.
Now looks how this basic physics and atomic theory helps us in my practice to make a living.
I use a water soluble crystalline substance called Fluorescein and inject into a patient's vein.
Once it reaches the retinal vessels, I excite it with with a light of 465 to 490 nanometers wavelength.
The electrons get excited but soon immediately start falling back to their original levels releasing a radiation of slightly longer wavelength of 520 to 530 nanometers.
This I photograph using a special camera and I get the status of blood vessels!
This is atomic theory in action!
Stay tuned to the voice of the Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/31/2016
Just as Ernst Abbe published his resolution limit of a microscope in Jena, German Empire a man named Otto Schott in the same city had invented a special type of glass.
This was the borosilicate glass.
Now this new glass is highly tolerant to heat and substantially resistant to sudden temperature change and chemicals.
Otto Schott shared his discovery with Ernst Abbe which became the catalyst for a long professional relationship between the two.
If this was not good enough, in comes another man who had opened up a lens making shop in 1840s in the same city of Jena.
This shop started specializing in making microscopes in 1847.
His first microscopes were just single lens microscopes intended for dissecting work.
He managed to sell 23 of them in the very first year even in those primitive dark days.
Do you by any chance happen to know his name?
Yes Sir, he was none other than Carl Zeiss himself!
In 1872, he hired Ernst Abbe and later Otto Schott.
These three joined together to lay the foundation not only of the company Carl Zeiss AG but also modern optics.
Today I get my roti (Indian bread) literally under their light.
Stay tuned to the enlightening voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/1/2016
Ernst Abbe's contribution to my life and my profession and my survival is not merely limited to his defining of numerical aperture
(NA = n sin theta) and discovering the resolution limit of microscope (diffraction).
Once he teamed up with Carl Zeiss and Otto Schott, the private enterprise and the spirit on entrepreneurship spurred his mind to higher goals.
He became the research director and the brain behind innovation at the Zeiss Optical Works as it was called then, at the age of 26.
Just 26!
By age of 28, he had invented the apochromatic lens or apo.
Apo consist of 3 lenses of special shapes which bring light of three different frequencies to a common focus.
Apo dramatically reduce both the chromatic and spherical aberrations, thereby remarkably improving the imaging of all our optical devices.
By the age of 30, he had invented Abbe condenser.
Now what is a condenser?
It is essentially a light concentrator.
They are located in almost all compound microscopes (optical or electron) close to the light source.
The condenser is composed of 2 lenses along with an iris diaphragm.
Robert Koch, the great microbe hunter on whom I did a 3 part bed-time story had complained to Abbe about the quality of his poor photography of the bugs.
Abbe provided a good quality condenser to Koch (one great mind helping another).
Then again, in another year, at the age of 31 he designed the first refractometer which hr described in a booklet published in 1874.
Now what is a refractometer I wonder?
It is a device that measures the index of refraction using Snell's law which we had all studied in high school.
This is a remarkably cunning device that I use nearly everyday.
It uses a light source from LED and directs it to a prism where the light undergoes refraction.
Now the machine "knows" the refractive index of the prism.
When a sample say another lens is tested, depending on it's refractive index, it will bend the light further exceeding the critical angle and making light undergo total internal reflection.
A sensor can sense the difference between the light refracted and light totally internally reflected.
This data is enough to calculate the refractive index of the tested lens or the human eye.
Quite a cunning machine from this mind of a brain labelled as Ernst Abbe.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the story telling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/2/2016
By the age of 36, in 1886, Ernst Abbe was made a partner at the Zeiss Optical Works and began to share in the considerable profits this shop was making.
Yet he continued to work on quality objectives, not only for microscopes but also for telescopes.
He formulated the Abbe sine condition, a mathematical equation used widely in optics.
It is a condition that must be fulfilled by a lens or an optical system in order to produce sharp images of off-axis as well as on-axis objects.
The Abbe sine condition along with Fourier optics (again pure mathematics which rule our lives) form very powerful calculations which later gave rise to phase contrast microscopes and still later electron microscopes.
So monumental was Abbe's contributions to optics, lens design and microscopy that Abbe shared the 1953 Nobel Prize for physics with Frits Zernike.
I hope u remember the Dutch Fritz Zernike and his orthogonal polynomials on a unit disc which he used to describe the HOA (higher order aberrations).
Ernst Abbe besides his pioneering work in optics was also at the forefront of labor reform.
At Zeiss he introduced the eight-hour work day ( he could never forget his father had slogged 14 hours every day).
He created a pension fund and a discharge compensation fund for his employees.
He set up and endowed the Carl Zeiss Foundation for research in science.
He made it a point that the success of an employee was based solely on their ability and performance, not on their origin, religion or political views.
Such are the momentous contributions of this single man and yet so little is known of him even by us "learned doctors" who thrive on his legacy.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/2/2016
Ha ha ha
6/3/2016
6/3/2016
Just like me, the vacuum tube or the Lenard tube as it was then known, had many lovers.
One of them was yet another German who went by the name of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen born in 1845 in the German Confederation.
Just to let you know, the idea of nation states as we presently are used to, is a fairly recent one.
One of the chief characteristic of a nation state is the attitude towards its territory: it is sacred and nontransferable.
Besides this, nation states tend to use the state as an instrument of national unity, using homogeneity in social norms, economic policies and cultural life.
It is generally agreed that nation states arose as late as 1800s primarily in Europe.
They were an inadvertent byproduct of the intellectual discoveries that were started to be made in 1400s on political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, cartography and political geography.
Before them, there used to be multiethnic empires like we know so well in South Asia, the Austrian Empire, Kingdom of France, Kingdom of Hungary, Dynasties of China, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and of course, our dear good old British Empire.
The German Confederation was something in between an Empire and a nation state (u must recall that it was formed after the demise of the Holy Roman Empire following the destructive Thirty Year's War).
In such a transient Confederation was born this man who too began to fiddle around with Lenard tubes after obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich (in Switzerland which itself is even now a Confederation officially known as Confoederatio Helvetica in Latin or the Swiss Confederation).
It is important to digress in storytelling to give a panoramic view of the historical events.
This was crucial part of the Shakespearian plays in the form of the theatre and stage setup.
We shall continue with the story of this German.
Why did Europeans and specially the Germans contributed so much to fundamental science and our understanding of nature still perplexes me.
But I am glad they did.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/4/2016
Wilhelm Roentgen by the age of 45 had become a professor of physics at the University of Giessen.
Just like anyone of us, he wanted to flee away to America as by then, science, specially electronics was shifting away to west from the continent.
He had got an appointment at Columbia University in New York City.
He had purchased his transatlantic tickets and was about to set sail when the madness of the World War 1 broke out in 1914.
Following that he was forced to remain in Munich for the rest of his life.
In 1895 when he was 50 years old he was experimenting with the Lenard tubes.
Yet another German Philipp Lenard had discovered the cathode rays as early as in 1888 by devising small metallic windows in the vacuum tubes which came to be known as Lenard windows.
Having made these windows, the rays were made to pass into another chamber completely evacuated and then detect the rays and their intensity by the glow on paper sheets coated with phosphorescent materials like barium platinocyanide.
Roentgen went one step further.
He had a feeling that these rays could penetrate even intact think glass without having these Lenard windows.
So he feverishly decided to test his idea.
This time he used a Crookes tube which had much thicker glass than Lenard.
This had no holes and he covered it light tight with a black cardboard box.
He darkened the room completely (not difficult in those days specially in wintery Europe).
As he powered his Crookes tube with a Ruhmkorff coil (an induction coil or an electrical transformer), he noticed a faint shimmering a few feet away from the tube.
Just like a ghostly apparition.
He was puzzled.
When he struck a match, he saw the shimmering came at the spot where the barium platinocyanide screen was located.
He repeated his experiments for the worry that his fellow colleagues may mock his remarkable findings.
He worked diligently making notes, describing what objects and how thick were transparent to these strange rays.
Finally, he discovered that photographic plates were sensitive to these rays and he could record his evidence.
Repeatable and verifiable evidence is the most powerful tool of science.
The very first picture that he took using these unknown rays was that of his wife's hand.
The rest as they say is history.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/5/2016
Wilhelm Roentgen published his findings in three original papers.
The first one was published on 28 December, 1895 titled:
"On a new kind of rays".
Hardly eye catching.
Today Roentgen is considered the father of medical radiology.
In 1901, he was awarded the very first Nobel Prize in Physics.
The question that keeps haunting me is this:
Why do men like these dedicate their entire life in search of truth by probing and experimenting the nature?
Is it money?
Is it fame?
Was it their poverty and desperation that drove them?
I do not think so.
Wilhelm Roentgen donated his entire award money to the University of Wurzburg.
Unlike many American investigators like Edison, he did not take out patents on his discoveries.
(He had inherited 2 million Reichsmarks after his father's death).
With the inflation setting in Germany after its defeat in World War I, he later fell into bankruptcy.
He died in 1923 from carcinoma of intestine in utter penury.
Today if u happen to visit Germany, do go to Wurzburg in northern Bavaria where a non profit organization maintains his laboratory and provided guided tours to the Roentgen Memorial Site.
Besides his experiments, this memorial gives a wonderful insight into the particle physics of late 1800s.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/6/2016
Phillip Lenard is a very interesting character in German physics.
He was born in 1862 in the Kingdom of Hungary but died in Germany in 1947.
(You can see how fragile and meaningless political borders are).
Like so many, he worked on vacuum tubes and was bestowed the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays.
He worked under bid scientific pezzonovante like Robert Bunsen, Lorand Eotvos (inventor of torsion balance which Coulomb used to discover the law) and Hermann von Helmholtz.
He gave a pretty accurate description of cathode rays describing them as quanta of electricity with a negative charge.
Interestingly, just like me, he became obsessed with so called Deutsche Physik or German Physics.
In his book published in 1933 under the Nazi regime titled:
"Great Men in Science, a History of Scientific Progress",
he chose to ignore Einstein and Curie labelling them condescendingly as Jewish Physics.
This nationalistic jingoism specially ran high after the loss in the World War I and bitter humiliation imposed on Germany at the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.
Lenard enjoyed a huge support under the Nazi rule as they in turn had found an eminent scientist to carry out their "Final Solution".
So u see mon ami, how sometimes very smart and learned men can go astray.
As much as I admire Germans for producing the finest minds in mathematics and physics, it is these same people who in hypnotic unison hailed Hitler like mindless robots.
These very people did nothing as they let their regime conduct systematic and efficient pogrom of their neighbours, their professors, their storekeepers...
People who were there friends just days ago.
Imagine such stupidity and criminal torpidity coming from the society which probably most of us invariably and unknowingly consider the elite of the planet earth!
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the thoughtful chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/7/2016
6/7/2016
How to make a swing
6/7/2016
Much before the vacuum tubes and much before we understood electricity and atoms, we had invented the induction coil or the spark coil.
The credit for inventing this device often goes to a German called Heinrich Ruhmkorff born in Hanover, Germany in 1803.
To be more accurate, Ruhmkorff first patented and commercialized it.
Its true inventor was an Irish priest Father Nicholas Callan who was very much inspired with men like
1. Alessandro Volta
2. Luigi Galvani and
3. Michael Faraday
Callan invented the first coil way back in 1834.
Just like the refractometer, it is a devilishly cunning device.
From a low voltage direct current u can get a high voltage alternating current just by coiling insulated copper wire 2 times around a common iron core.
This cunning devise works from the fundamental laws of electromagnetism that a current flowing through a wire generates magnetic field.
And a changing magnetic field (magnetic flux) generates electric current;
(Faraday's law of induction which was later neatly written out in the form of mathematical equations by James Clerk Maxwell).
In this device the primary copper coil creates a magnetic field.
Magnetic field is a form of stored energy.
When the current is broken, the magnetic field collapses which induces current in the second coil.
Because of large number of turns in the secondary coil, this secondary voltage pulse is many thousands of volts leading to an electric spark.
Ruhmkorff greatly improved this device after lot of experimentations.
It was so successful commercially that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the Emperor of the Second French Empire (no nation state, only empires) awarded him 50,000 francs in 1858.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the story telling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/7/2016
Ruhmkorff induction coil
Now just see how elegantly we exploit the atoms to our advantage.
Just one medical example for tonight.
This is another example why the atomic theory is not "just a theory";
the way most of us put it so derogatorily.
The atomic theory currently envisages the central nucleus to be surrounded by a cloud of electronic probability at certain energy levels.
These electrons if bombarded with an electromagnetic wave can absorb certain energy and leap to higher levels or shells.
At higher levels they lack stability and tend to Falk back to their original levels.
In doing so they emit the absorbed energy.
This released energy is always less than the absorbed energy following the critical law of conservation of energy.
Hence the wavelength of the reemitted energy is always longer than the absorbed energy (wavelength is inversely related to energy).
This phenomenon of energy release by the falling of excited electrons from higher unstable levels to lower stable levels is called:
1. Fluorescence if it happens immediately.
and...
2. Phosphorescence if it happens after a significant delay from the time of absorption.
Now looks how this basic physics and atomic theory helps us in my practice to make a living.
I use a water soluble crystalline substance called Fluorescein and inject into a patient's vein.
Once it reaches the retinal vessels, I excite it with with a light of 465 to 490 nanometers wavelength.
The electrons get excited but soon immediately start falling back to their original levels releasing a radiation of slightly longer wavelength of 520 to 530 nanometers.
This I photograph using a special camera and I get the status of blood vessels!
This is atomic theory in action!
Stay tuned to the voice of the Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/31/2016
Just as Ernst Abbe published his resolution limit of a microscope in Jena, German Empire a man named Otto Schott in the same city had invented a special type of glass.
This was the borosilicate glass.
Now this new glass is highly tolerant to heat and substantially resistant to sudden temperature change and chemicals.
Otto Schott shared his discovery with Ernst Abbe which became the catalyst for a long professional relationship between the two.
If this was not good enough, in comes another man who had opened up a lens making shop in 1840s in the same city of Jena.
This shop started specializing in making microscopes in 1847.
His first microscopes were just single lens microscopes intended for dissecting work.
He managed to sell 23 of them in the very first year even in those primitive dark days.
Do you by any chance happen to know his name?
Yes Sir, he was none other than Carl Zeiss himself!
In 1872, he hired Ernst Abbe and later Otto Schott.
These three joined together to lay the foundation not only of the company Carl Zeiss AG but also modern optics.
Today I get my roti (Indian bread) literally under their light.
Stay tuned to the enlightening voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/1/2016
Ernst Abbe's contribution to my life and my profession and my survival is not merely limited to his defining of numerical aperture
(NA = n sin theta) and discovering the resolution limit of microscope (diffraction).
Once he teamed up with Carl Zeiss and Otto Schott, the private enterprise and the spirit on entrepreneurship spurred his mind to higher goals.
He became the research director and the brain behind innovation at the Zeiss Optical Works as it was called then, at the age of 26.
Just 26!
By age of 28, he had invented the apochromatic lens or apo.
Apo consist of 3 lenses of special shapes which bring light of three different frequencies to a common focus.
Apo dramatically reduce both the chromatic and spherical aberrations, thereby remarkably improving the imaging of all our optical devices.
By the age of 30, he had invented Abbe condenser.
Now what is a condenser?
It is essentially a light concentrator.
They are located in almost all compound microscopes (optical or electron) close to the light source.
The condenser is composed of 2 lenses along with an iris diaphragm.
Robert Koch, the great microbe hunter on whom I did a 3 part bed-time story had complained to Abbe about the quality of his poor photography of the bugs.
Abbe provided a good quality condenser to Koch (one great mind helping another).
Then again, in another year, at the age of 31 he designed the first refractometer which hr described in a booklet published in 1874.
Now what is a refractometer I wonder?
It is a device that measures the index of refraction using Snell's law which we had all studied in high school.
This is a remarkably cunning device that I use nearly everyday.
It uses a light source from LED and directs it to a prism where the light undergoes refraction.
Now the machine "knows" the refractive index of the prism.
When a sample say another lens is tested, depending on it's refractive index, it will bend the light further exceeding the critical angle and making light undergo total internal reflection.
A sensor can sense the difference between the light refracted and light totally internally reflected.
This data is enough to calculate the refractive index of the tested lens or the human eye.
Quite a cunning machine from this mind of a brain labelled as Ernst Abbe.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the story telling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/2/2016
By the age of 36, in 1886, Ernst Abbe was made a partner at the Zeiss Optical Works and began to share in the considerable profits this shop was making.
Yet he continued to work on quality objectives, not only for microscopes but also for telescopes.
He formulated the Abbe sine condition, a mathematical equation used widely in optics.
It is a condition that must be fulfilled by a lens or an optical system in order to produce sharp images of off-axis as well as on-axis objects.
The Abbe sine condition along with Fourier optics (again pure mathematics which rule our lives) form very powerful calculations which later gave rise to phase contrast microscopes and still later electron microscopes.
So monumental was Abbe's contributions to optics, lens design and microscopy that Abbe shared the 1953 Nobel Prize for physics with Frits Zernike.
I hope u remember the Dutch Fritz Zernike and his orthogonal polynomials on a unit disc which he used to describe the HOA (higher order aberrations).
Ernst Abbe besides his pioneering work in optics was also at the forefront of labor reform.
At Zeiss he introduced the eight-hour work day ( he could never forget his father had slogged 14 hours every day).
He created a pension fund and a discharge compensation fund for his employees.
He set up and endowed the Carl Zeiss Foundation for research in science.
He made it a point that the success of an employee was based solely on their ability and performance, not on their origin, religion or political views.
Such are the momentous contributions of this single man and yet so little is known of him even by us "learned doctors" who thrive on his legacy.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/2/2016
Ha ha ha
6/3/2016
6/3/2016
Just like me, the vacuum tube or the Lenard tube as it was then known, had many lovers.
One of them was yet another German who went by the name of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen born in 1845 in the German Confederation.
Just to let you know, the idea of nation states as we presently are used to, is a fairly recent one.
One of the chief characteristic of a nation state is the attitude towards its territory: it is sacred and nontransferable.
Besides this, nation states tend to use the state as an instrument of national unity, using homogeneity in social norms, economic policies and cultural life.
It is generally agreed that nation states arose as late as 1800s primarily in Europe.
They were an inadvertent byproduct of the intellectual discoveries that were started to be made in 1400s on political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, cartography and political geography.
Before them, there used to be multiethnic empires like we know so well in South Asia, the Austrian Empire, Kingdom of France, Kingdom of Hungary, Dynasties of China, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and of course, our dear good old British Empire.
The German Confederation was something in between an Empire and a nation state (u must recall that it was formed after the demise of the Holy Roman Empire following the destructive Thirty Year's War).
In such a transient Confederation was born this man who too began to fiddle around with Lenard tubes after obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich (in Switzerland which itself is even now a Confederation officially known as Confoederatio Helvetica in Latin or the Swiss Confederation).
It is important to digress in storytelling to give a panoramic view of the historical events.
This was crucial part of the Shakespearian plays in the form of the theatre and stage setup.
We shall continue with the story of this German.
Why did Europeans and specially the Germans contributed so much to fundamental science and our understanding of nature still perplexes me.
But I am glad they did.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/4/2016
Wilhelm Roentgen by the age of 45 had become a professor of physics at the University of Giessen.
Just like anyone of us, he wanted to flee away to America as by then, science, specially electronics was shifting away to west from the continent.
He had got an appointment at Columbia University in New York City.
He had purchased his transatlantic tickets and was about to set sail when the madness of the World War 1 broke out in 1914.
Following that he was forced to remain in Munich for the rest of his life.
In 1895 when he was 50 years old he was experimenting with the Lenard tubes.
Yet another German Philipp Lenard had discovered the cathode rays as early as in 1888 by devising small metallic windows in the vacuum tubes which came to be known as Lenard windows.
Having made these windows, the rays were made to pass into another chamber completely evacuated and then detect the rays and their intensity by the glow on paper sheets coated with phosphorescent materials like barium platinocyanide.
Roentgen went one step further.
He had a feeling that these rays could penetrate even intact think glass without having these Lenard windows.
So he feverishly decided to test his idea.
This time he used a Crookes tube which had much thicker glass than Lenard.
This had no holes and he covered it light tight with a black cardboard box.
He darkened the room completely (not difficult in those days specially in wintery Europe).
As he powered his Crookes tube with a Ruhmkorff coil (an induction coil or an electrical transformer), he noticed a faint shimmering a few feet away from the tube.
Just like a ghostly apparition.
He was puzzled.
When he struck a match, he saw the shimmering came at the spot where the barium platinocyanide screen was located.
He repeated his experiments for the worry that his fellow colleagues may mock his remarkable findings.
He worked diligently making notes, describing what objects and how thick were transparent to these strange rays.
Finally, he discovered that photographic plates were sensitive to these rays and he could record his evidence.
Repeatable and verifiable evidence is the most powerful tool of science.
The very first picture that he took using these unknown rays was that of his wife's hand.
The rest as they say is history.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/5/2016
Wilhelm Roentgen published his findings in three original papers.
The first one was published on 28 December, 1895 titled:
"On a new kind of rays".
Hardly eye catching.
Today Roentgen is considered the father of medical radiology.
In 1901, he was awarded the very first Nobel Prize in Physics.
The question that keeps haunting me is this:
Why do men like these dedicate their entire life in search of truth by probing and experimenting the nature?
Is it money?
Is it fame?
Was it their poverty and desperation that drove them?
I do not think so.
Wilhelm Roentgen donated his entire award money to the University of Wurzburg.
Unlike many American investigators like Edison, he did not take out patents on his discoveries.
(He had inherited 2 million Reichsmarks after his father's death).
With the inflation setting in Germany after its defeat in World War I, he later fell into bankruptcy.
He died in 1923 from carcinoma of intestine in utter penury.
Today if u happen to visit Germany, do go to Wurzburg in northern Bavaria where a non profit organization maintains his laboratory and provided guided tours to the Roentgen Memorial Site.
Besides his experiments, this memorial gives a wonderful insight into the particle physics of late 1800s.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/6/2016
Phillip Lenard is a very interesting character in German physics.
He was born in 1862 in the Kingdom of Hungary but died in Germany in 1947.
(You can see how fragile and meaningless political borders are).
Like so many, he worked on vacuum tubes and was bestowed the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays.
He worked under bid scientific pezzonovante like Robert Bunsen, Lorand Eotvos (inventor of torsion balance which Coulomb used to discover the law) and Hermann von Helmholtz.
He gave a pretty accurate description of cathode rays describing them as quanta of electricity with a negative charge.
Interestingly, just like me, he became obsessed with so called Deutsche Physik or German Physics.
In his book published in 1933 under the Nazi regime titled:
"Great Men in Science, a History of Scientific Progress",
he chose to ignore Einstein and Curie labelling them condescendingly as Jewish Physics.
This nationalistic jingoism specially ran high after the loss in the World War I and bitter humiliation imposed on Germany at the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.
Lenard enjoyed a huge support under the Nazi rule as they in turn had found an eminent scientist to carry out their "Final Solution".
So u see mon ami, how sometimes very smart and learned men can go astray.
As much as I admire Germans for producing the finest minds in mathematics and physics, it is these same people who in hypnotic unison hailed Hitler like mindless robots.
These very people did nothing as they let their regime conduct systematic and efficient pogrom of their neighbours, their professors, their storekeepers...
People who were there friends just days ago.
Imagine such stupidity and criminal torpidity coming from the society which probably most of us invariably and unknowingly consider the elite of the planet earth!
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the thoughtful chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/7/2016
6/7/2016
How to make a swing
6/7/2016
Much before the vacuum tubes and much before we understood electricity and atoms, we had invented the induction coil or the spark coil.
The credit for inventing this device often goes to a German called Heinrich Ruhmkorff born in Hanover, Germany in 1803.
To be more accurate, Ruhmkorff first patented and commercialized it.
Its true inventor was an Irish priest Father Nicholas Callan who was very much inspired with men like
1. Alessandro Volta
2. Luigi Galvani and
3. Michael Faraday
Callan invented the first coil way back in 1834.
Just like the refractometer, it is a devilishly cunning device.
From a low voltage direct current u can get a high voltage alternating current just by coiling insulated copper wire 2 times around a common iron core.
This cunning devise works from the fundamental laws of electromagnetism that a current flowing through a wire generates magnetic field.
And a changing magnetic field (magnetic flux) generates electric current;
(Faraday's law of induction which was later neatly written out in the form of mathematical equations by James Clerk Maxwell).
In this device the primary copper coil creates a magnetic field.
Magnetic field is a form of stored energy.
When the current is broken, the magnetic field collapses which induces current in the second coil.
Because of large number of turns in the secondary coil, this secondary voltage pulse is many thousands of volts leading to an electric spark.
Ruhmkorff greatly improved this device after lot of experimentations.
It was so successful commercially that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the Emperor of the Second French Empire (no nation state, only empires) awarded him 50,000 francs in 1858.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the story telling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
6/7/2016
Ruhmkorff induction coil
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