June 21, 2016 Tuesday
The day before the attack
Also the day when thanks to Monish my friend, I started
actually publishing it online
One of the greatest oddities of the fascinating life of Ernest Rutherford is that he made his greatest contribution to our understanding of nature (its building block to be precise), AFTER he was blessed with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.
At the McGill University in Montreal where he stayed till 1907, he was primarily focused on radioactivity (following Becquerel and Curie).
It was here in 1899 that he coined the terms alpha ray and beta ray.
(Remember mon ami, coining = publishing in a peer reviewed Western scientific journal of Western repute for the first time and accepted by major associations or societies of that field).
Later he began to study thorium (naturally occurring radioactive PRIMORDIAL element having atomic number 90).
The wore primordial needs some explanation.
Primordial elements ate nuclides found on earth that have existed in their current form since BEFORE earth was formed.
They are residues from the Big Bang and from ancient and violent supernova explosions that took place EVEN before the formation of the solar system (mind boggling, isn't it?)!
Thorium was discovered in 1830s.
As I said, chemistry always ran faster than physics.
Biology was the laggard as even such a simple and elegance idea of evolution by natural selection came so so late (relative to say gravity or heliocentric model of solar system).
On studying thorium, Rutherford that a sample of radioactive thorium always took the same amount of time to decay, no matter what size.
Remember the unit of radioactive decay is both Curie (Ci) and Becquerel (Bq).
Thereby he came across and defined the term "half life".
In his Nobel Lecture given on December 11, 1908, Rutherford spoke mostly about radioactivity and recognition of the alpha rays as helium atoms.
From his work and that of Frederick Soddy, you will know how painstaking it was just to prove that alpha rays are essentially helium atoms.
In his Nobel lecture, Rutherford spoke about all the great men and a woman on whose work he had build up his research.
We shall continue with his fascinating journey for some nights.
I am touched to my core that my best friend has collated all or most of my bed-time stories in a blog:
http://panarrans.blogspot.com/
What can I say!
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
The day before the attack
Also the day when thanks to Monish my friend, I started
actually publishing it online
One of the greatest oddities of the fascinating life of Ernest Rutherford is that he made his greatest contribution to our understanding of nature (its building block to be precise), AFTER he was blessed with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.
At the McGill University in Montreal where he stayed till 1907, he was primarily focused on radioactivity (following Becquerel and Curie).
It was here in 1899 that he coined the terms alpha ray and beta ray.
(Remember mon ami, coining = publishing in a peer reviewed Western scientific journal of Western repute for the first time and accepted by major associations or societies of that field).
Later he began to study thorium (naturally occurring radioactive PRIMORDIAL element having atomic number 90).
The wore primordial needs some explanation.
Primordial elements ate nuclides found on earth that have existed in their current form since BEFORE earth was formed.
They are residues from the Big Bang and from ancient and violent supernova explosions that took place EVEN before the formation of the solar system (mind boggling, isn't it?)!
Thorium was discovered in 1830s.
As I said, chemistry always ran faster than physics.
Biology was the laggard as even such a simple and elegance idea of evolution by natural selection came so so late (relative to say gravity or heliocentric model of solar system).
On studying thorium, Rutherford that a sample of radioactive thorium always took the same amount of time to decay, no matter what size.
Remember the unit of radioactive decay is both Curie (Ci) and Becquerel (Bq).
Thereby he came across and defined the term "half life".
In his Nobel Lecture given on December 11, 1908, Rutherford spoke mostly about radioactivity and recognition of the alpha rays as helium atoms.
From his work and that of Frederick Soddy, you will know how painstaking it was just to prove that alpha rays are essentially helium atoms.
In his Nobel lecture, Rutherford spoke about all the great men and a woman on whose work he had build up his research.
We shall continue with his fascinating journey for some nights.
I am touched to my core that my best friend has collated all or most of my bed-time stories in a blog:
http://panarrans.blogspot.com/
What can I say!
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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