July 31, 2016 Sunday



Yesterday father and I had spent 2 hours at the Kalachowky police station. 

The investigating officer has been changed from Inspector Pawar to Inspector Deshmukh.

This had happened quite suddenly on July 26th Tuesday.

We were shocked to know that the hearing of the 5 accused was over on 25th Monday.

Their bail order was set for 26th.

Our investigating officer Pawar had kept us blind.

So was our so called friend and the criminal advocate Satish Kotyan whose brother had
actually taken up the case for the accused.

Our own advocate Rizwan Merchant described his fraternity of criminal lawyers as
prostitutes.

For money they would go to bed with anybody.   

Then immediately we rushed to Merchant's office and reached there by 2 .15 pm.

Leaving everything aside, without any papers for intervention, he rushed to the court.

And managed to stop the bail order from being passed.

When I called Inspector Pawar later asking why he did not inform me about the bail proceedings.

He lied.

He told me that he and the APP (appointed public prosecutor) had manged to stop the bail
order from being passed (when he was not even in the court).

Then I knew this officer was on the take.

We were back stabbed and betrayed both by our investigating officer and so called friend
Satish Kotyan.

Then we knew we could trust no one.  

The senior police officer Inspector Ughle also gave us another shocker.

The Crime Branch officer Jadhav who had let Sanjay get away (obviously after accepting 
a hefty bribe), has been transferred.

We have also been told that Judge Wankhade in whose court Sanjay Veera's bail hearing
has been set for has also been well bribed.

Now tell me, in such a world, where everyone works for illegal money abrogading their
duties can justice be expected! 

Right from the crime branch officer, to the investigating officer, to the lawyers and judges;
Everybody is deep in nefarious debauchery and profiteering.   

My new investigating officer told me that the case against Sanjay Ramniklal Veera is still
very weak in the court of law. (This is because he was allowed to flee in the first instance, and
allowed to manipulate and grease everybody's palms).

It is a sick world, I knew all the while.

To experience it first hand is an altogether distressing and a frightening experience.

My greatest consolation comes from the fact that very sagely I did not reproduce bringing
another life incalculable anguish and torment.      



Bedtime Story



Following copper, the second element that our ancestors befriended was lead or Pb from Latin Plumbum.

It was being used as early as 7000 B.C. by the Egyptians.

With an atomic number of 82, it falls in the group 14 under carbon.

It is one of those heavy elements that were formed much later after the big bang in the extreme conditions of exploding supernovae.

You may recall that elements with atomic number from 6 to 26 are formed in the burning stars (stellar nucleosynthesis).

You much understand that in nature things start from simplicity and advance to complexity.

Such is the case with elements.

Elements form by a process called neutron capture which can either be slow called s-process or rapid called r-process.

The slow process is reeeaaally slow, and can take up centuries or millennia (This should give you an idea how insignificantly short our lives are).

The rapid neutron capture process is real quick and takes just tens of seconds.

Just see the beauty of element creation in the stars.

In space, in the stars or supernovae, a nucleus of an atom may capture a neutron.

If the resulting nucleus is unstable, it will undergo a beta decay (remember Rutherford, Chadwick, Geiger?), and become an element of next atomic number.

For instance, Lead-204 is created from short lived thallium-204.

Thallium-204 on capturing another neutron becomes lead-205, an isotope of lead.

This goes on till the isotope lead-208 is formed.

This lead-208 by the s-process or the r-process becomes lead-209, which quickly undergoes beta decay and becomes bismuth-209.

Voila!

The miracle of stellar and supernovae nucleosynthesis which requires no magic...
Just chemistry.

Isn't it so satisfying to know and understand the process of our Genesis?

I believe all class 7 and 8 science books should start with these topics just as the bible begins with Genesis.

There is something to be learnt from the Bible after all.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 30, 2016 Saturday



Influenza kills 250,000 to 500,000 human apes every year.

The 1918 influenza pandemic killed 50 to 100 million humans in just 2years.

The butchery of 4 years of World War 1 was 38 million or so.

The virus is merely a single strand of RNA (not even a DNA, and not double stranded) within
a wall of glycoprotein. 

Unlike in USA, in our mahan Bharat, the influenza strikes upon us twice.

One in the monsoons starting June and one in the winters starting November.

My mother just survived a nasty attack of influenza which had precipitated a severe lower
respiratory tract infection and accompanying bronchospasm.  

She is slowly weaning herself off the oxygen (and not the ventilator mind you).

She is down from 3 to 1 oral antibiotics.

Her steroids are also being tapered down.

My concern is always the next attack.

Bombay is a fertile ground for most types of germs, specially the germs which get
transmitted via the airborne route and through hand-to-eye, hand-to-nose and 
hand-to-mouth transmission.

Public hygiene and health awareness being abysmally low. 




Gibbs's 300-page treatise is often referred to as the Gibbs's "Equilibrium" paper.

It is considered one of the landmark achievements in science of 1800s.

It laid the foundation for the physical chemistry and thermodynamics.

Now just try to understand how critically the concept of Gibbs free energy is interlinked with entropy, the second law of thermodynamics and the billions of biochemical reactions  that go on in our cellular machinery.

A chemical reaction will (or can) occur spontaneously if the change in the total entropy of the universe that would be caused by the reaction is non negative.

In essence, as per the second law of thermodynamics (the most unshakeable law we have come to know), for systems reacting at STP (standard temperature and pressure),
There is a natural tendency to achieve a minimum of Gibbs free energy (or maximum entropy).

Gibbs free energy is a (negative) surrogate for the change in total entropy of the universe.

G(p,t) = U + pV - TS

G being the Gibbs free energy
U the internal energy in joule
S is the entropy in joule per kelvin

U can see S appears in negative coefficient with respect to G.

A reaction with positive Gibbs free energy will not proceed spontaneously.

But we saw this happening in the biological systems like our Electron Transport  Chain coupled with proton transfer across the membranes.

Both in photosynthesis and cellular level oxidation (and ATP synthesis).

This happens because energy inputs from sources like the sun and other exothermic reactions (like oceanic beds thermal vents) are "coupled" with these reactions that are not entropically favoured (which have Gibbs free energy above zero).

Once the "coupling" is taken into account, the total entropy of the universe increases.

This coupling allows reactions such as photosynthesis, ETC chain, cellular respiration, DNA syntheses to happen without violating the second law of thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics is virtually the holy grail of the entire scientific edifice.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 29, 2016 Friday



Today Sanjay's bail has been temporarily halted.

Today's hearing was brief.

Date has been set for August 5 for changing the court and for
allowing intervention.

There will be another date for the argument against bail.

Unit 50000 eV


Willard Gibbs was presenting to the world a revolutionary idea.

It was that of the "free energy" (even as I must insist that nothing in this world is for free).

Gibbs originally defined the idea of free energy graphically.

In his first 1873 paper titled:
"Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids"
he used the state of the body using the 2 coordinates of entropy and volume.

In his second paper published later in the same year titled:
"A Method of Geometrical Representation of the Thermodynamic Properties of Substances by Means of Surfaces",
he added the third coordinate representing the energy of the body.

But as I said, it was his third 300-page treatise that would prove to be his magnum opus.

In this mammoth 300-page disquisition he applied the
first law of thermodynamics (energy can be transformed but not created),
the second law of thermodynamics (total entropy of isolated system increases over time) and
the fundamental thermodynamic relation (dU = TdS - PdV)
to predict and quantify thermodynamic reaction tendencies in any any thermodynamic system.

This he did in a visual, 3-D graphical language of Lagrangian calculus and phase transitions.

Now each word in the above 2 statements need in depth explanation.

Which I will need to do very soon.

For that, stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 28, 2016 Thursday



Today our advocate Rizwan Merchant made an intervention application against the bail order of the 5 accused.

Sessions Court

Room 29

Judge Satavdekar

He was allowed by the judge even though it was not our right.

Once our intervention was accepted by the judge, advocate Merchant argued vehemently and passionately against the bail application of the 5 accused.

The advocate for the opposite parties did not any strong points
to counter as far as the merit of the case went.  

The order has been set for August 1, 2016.

Unit 200000 eV

We have come to know that Inspector Pawar, my investigating officer
let Sanjay Ramniklal Veera escape along with his family.

With money, everything can be bought.

Such is the poverty of this "mahan bharat". 



Maxwell's appreciation of the thermodynamic paper (wherein Gibbs had introduced the idea of phase diagrams) by Gibbs is reflected by his inclusion in his 1875 book a chapter on Gibbs's work.

The book by Maxwell was titled "Theory of Heat".

Maxwell even discussed the usefulness of Gibbs's diagrams to the Chemical Society of London.

In all likelihood Maxwell would certainly have collaborated with Gibbs for future publications.

Alas this was rendered impossible by the early death of Maxwell in 1879 at a premature age of 48.

It was said that there a wisecrack in circulation at Yale:
"Only one man lived capable of understanding Gibbs's papers.
That was Maxwell, and now he is dead."

Gibbs was not to be deterred.

He would soon go on to extend his thermodynamic analysis to systems composed more than one form of matter.

He published this as a  300-page paper titled:
"On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances".

It was published by the Connecticut Academy in 2 parts appearing in 1875 and later in 1878.

We shall need some time to discuss this influential paper.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 27, 2016 Wednesday




Today we successfully accomplished the Identification Parade.

It was conducted at the Arthur Road Jail.

Why do I say successful?

Because we were three witnesses:

My nurse Sarita, myself and a BMC worker and a good 
samartian Mr. Pawar who happened to be at the scene of the
crime on June 22, 2016 Wednesday

And we all made the correct identification of the 2 of the 5 accused 
who we had managed to see within those 30 seconds.

  Then evening was spent drafting and planning the papers with
Faiz Merchant and the ace lawyer Rizwan Merchant.

Unit 150000 eV

The investigating officer has been changed from Inspector Pawar
to the Inspector Deshmukh.

This was done by Additional Commissioner of Police Mr. Shinde
as he saw the investigation being misled, diluted and subverted. 



Gibbs got an appointment of Professor of Mathematical Physics at the age of 28 in the year 1839.

It was first such professorship in the United States.

And it came with one great perk;
No Salary!

Yes Sir, an unpaid "job" at the age of 28 in 1800s when people really did not live or survive that long.

Gibbs continued to work without a pay or salary till 1880, when he hit 41!

This is insane, right?

At the age of 41 when Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (my alma mater) offered him a position with an annual salary of 3000 USD, Yale counter offered him a salary of 2000 USD!

What a stupid counter offer.

And guess what?

Gibbs chose 2000 USD over the higher offer and continued with his position at Yale.

Gibbs first publication came rather late at the age of 34 in 1873.

It was a paper on geometric representation of thermodynamic quantities which was later used by Maxwell for constructing his electromagnetic theory.

One must understand that very few people existed in those times (and I dare day even fewer today in terms of percent), who had the capability of understanding Gibbs's work.

One was James Clerk Maxwell in England and some handful of others in Europe, the seat and center of scientific advancement in late 1800s.

Maxwell was so impressed that with his own hands he made a clay model illustrating Gibbs's construct.

It represents thermodynamic surface wherein the x axis represents volume, y axis the entropy and z axis the energy.

I shall try to send a picture of this model.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 26, 2016



Today I received the book "The Red Limit" by Timothy Ferris.

It was sent to me by my greatest, the oldest and may be the only
friend I have.

I am not sure what shocked me to a greater extent today.

The first-hand experience of corruption and crime collaboration of all the departments of the state with wealthy criminals or the extent of back-stabbing that happened with us.

It was a very important lesson.

Today most of the time spent in Police station and later at the Sessions Court.

Today 5 thugs who had attacked me were nearly about to get their bail order with the public prosecution offering no resistance to the diluted case that was put up by their criminal lawyer Mr. Mahesh Kotyan. 

The 5 accused who are in jail custody:

1. Raja Pallaniswami Devendra M/47
    The man who was given "supari" by Sanjay Ramniklal Veera
    to murder me 

2. Dipu alias Deepak Subhash Chaurasiya M/23
    The man who orchestrated the attack
    
3. Vijay alias Kali Krishna Chinnaswami M/22
    One of the two men who attacked me with sword and chopper.
    The other is Joy who is on the run

4. Sandy alias Sandeep Raj Pillai M/27
    Bike driver

5. Rupesh Chandrakant Donkar M/26
    Bike Driver
    


Along with the lawyers office.

Unit 150000 eV

Rizwan Merchant and his dramatic court appearance.



Josiah Willard Gibbs was an extremely quiet, serene man leaving a life of solitude (not loneliness) in New England, New Haven, Connecticut.

He never married and lived all his life with his sister Julia and her husband in his childhood home.

His money was largely inherited and not earned.

Yet he was a wise man investing his money judiciously so that at his death in 1903 at the age of 64, his estate was valued at 100,000 USD of those times!

First was called to the Kalachowky Police Station.

Got held up in the sessions court today.

What a hectic day!

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 25, 2016 Monday



Today the move was made.

Let us see how it plays out.

Unit 100000 eV (consultation and drafting)



Josiah Willard Gibbs was born in 1839, New Haven, Connecticut, the United States.

You would be shocked to see the United States of 1840s;
It was just 1/3rd Eastern part of what we know today.

Even Florida, Wisconsin and Iowa lay outside the United States.

Almost the whole of west of Arkansas was either Mexico or Republic of Texas.

He did his schooling from Hopkins School at New Haven, Connecticut and entered Yale College at the age of 15.

He was a very weak and frail man with recurrent lung infections and poor eyesight.

That is why probably he was lucky enough to have escaped being recruited in the American Civil War which lasted from 1861 to 1865 (Gibbs was 22 and a young man can always be sacrificed in such bloody political madness).

The 4 years of intense warfare had taken lives of 700,000 men or more.

More Americans had died in this bloody strife than the combined American casualties of World War I and World War II.

Gibbs Instead of killing men went on to do his PhD degree from Yale in 1861, the very year the American Civil War broke out.

He was then only the 5th American PhD graduate.

We shall continue to follow his contributions to theoretical physics, chemistry and mathematics in the nights to come.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 24, 2016 Sunday


Today was spent preparing the strategy to fight the evil.

Let us see how it all unfolds out in the following crucial week.  



Electron transport chain (ETC) is a fascinating chemistry used by nearly all forms of life.

Plants use it in the vital process of photosynthesis.

Bacteria and eukaryotes use  it in cellular respiration or oxidative phosphorylation.

It is fascinating how life could "learn" to use motion of electrons to drive proton or H+ pumps.

Skeptics and intelligent apes should ask the question:
What force can drive such a chain or pumps?

The answer is the Gibbs free energy.

The Gibbs free energy is the energy available ("free") to do work.

A reaction can occur spontaneously if there is an overall decrease in the Gibbs free energy.

I know I am not making it very clear.

Well...
Gibbs free energy is something like potential energy.

When a stone falls from a height, it looses its energy and does work.

This was easy.

Gibbs free energy is something like that in the world of thermodynamics.

It is measured in kilojoules.

It is an important concept of the second law of thermodynamics.

A system reacting at any fixed temperature and pressure, there is a general natural tendency to achieve a minimum Gibbs free energy.

An example is carbon of diamond to carbon of graphite would be spontaneous (even if very slow), as it is accompanied by decrease in the Gibbs free energy.

This is what drives the ETC.

The ETC at the end, translocates 4 protons H+ across the mitochondrial membrane, thereby creating and establishing a trans membrane difference of proton electrochemical potential.

The movement of protons from the inter membrane space into the matrix of mitochondria releases energy which powers the enzyme ATP synthase, an enzyme which has been conserved among all domains of life.

So where does the copper fit in the whole story?

Copper and iron lie in the heart of the enzyme Cytochrome c oxidase that binds oxygen molecule between these 2 elements.

Our mitochondria is chemistry at work (1000 to 2000 per cell. Average body having 37 trillion cells)!

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 23, 2016 Saturday


Unexpectedly busy OPD back to back.

Two cases of unexpected post operative hyphema after uneventful surgery are under observation.

Just goes on to show one can never take things for granted.

Thanks to Bits' meticulous and sharp mind and attention to fine details, we are building
up something substantial to fight the crime in our building.


Copper commonly exists in 2 oxidation states.

+1 or copper ( I ) or Cu1+ (in hypertext) which is called cuprous and + 2 or copper ( II ) or Cu2+.

These states depend on a simple principle of atomic theory (see the explanatory power of this theory).

How many electrons a particular atom is ready to give away, specially from its outermost orbital.

Now see how nature or life or biology started to exploit this simple ability of copper once oxygen began to appear in the earth's atmosphere.

The primordial earth was surprisingly hostile for carbon based biochemistry to flourish.

This copper got hijacked so to speak by a very cunning molecule known as cytochrome c oxidase in a very ingenious cell organelle known as mitochondria.

Cytochrome c oxidase is such a smart protein found in the cell wall of mitochondria, that nearly all life forms right from bacteria to all the eukaryotes (virtually whole of life tree), have ventured to use it.

Most people still do not realize the power of electron.

Our entire electronic and computing world, including logic gates depends on the controlled flow of electrons.

Similarly, in life or biology, the final end of breathing and survival depends on the molecular machinery of electron transport chain.

Electron transport chain or ETC is nothing but a series of compounds that transfer electrons via redox (reduction and oxidation occurring simultaneously) reactions.

Life in essence is pure chemistry.

Again I digress mon ami.

A nasty habit.

We shall continue with this fascinating subject that respects no boundaries between physics, chemistry, biology, microbiology, biochemistry or whatever we apes can think of to ease our limitations.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 22, 2016 Friday



Quite a crazy clinic today.

Was very happy to see my mother responding to oral antibiotics and
steroids.

Starting her on I.V. regime of drugs becomes quite a daunting task.

It is good that she understands the pathophysiology of her disease process.

She modifies her treatment as she thinks her body will need.

For example, even though the doctor had stopped Levosalbutamol, she on
her own very judiciously started taking it in the form of nebulizer.  

It greatly opened up her lungs.

Levosalbutamol is a bronchodilator which acts on beta 2 adrenergic 
receptors.

These specific receptors are found in most of our smooth muscles.


  

It is interesting to know that Copper got its name from the island country of Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean sea.

This was where it was predominantly mined during the Roman times.

Just see how the language evolved:
Aes cyprium (metal of Cyprus)...
Cuprum...
Copper

The names are similar in other European languages as well.

Another interesting fact regarding the colour of copper which is originally orange-red.

Can u guess the basis of the colour?

Yes Sir, once again the all powerful atomic theory.

The characteristic color results from the electron movements between the filled 3d and half empty 4s atomic shells.

I have not yet dealt with the concept of electron shells, subshells and orbitals which come from the Bohr model of the atom.

In fact, I have not dealt with Neils Bohr himself, a man who revolutionized physics with the idea of quantum mechanics.

It was actually this man who put forth the idea that electrons can drop from higher orbits to lower orbits, and in this process emit a photon of a discrete energy.

It is hard not to digress mon ami for explanation has no respect for subjects or topics.

We modern apes use copper for its conductive properties;
It is the preferred material for electrical and transmission cables and integrated circuits.

Biology too has found interesting ways to exploit copper as a vital trace element.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 21, 2016 Thursday


Thanks to Bits, today we made an audacious move.

To fight evil, one needs to be tenaciously unflinching.

My mother gave us the green flag.

  

The first element with which our love affair began was indubitably the copper.

With the atomic number of 29 (one less than 30), it is stationed in the fourth row somewhere right center (it could not have been left considering its business and commercial activities).

Copper usage has been found in the earliest civilizations of the Fertile Crescent (the bridge between Africa our birthplace and Eurasia, our migration destination) dating back to 9000 B.C. (11,000 years ago).

In Anatolia (Asian Turkey or Asia Minor, the Western most protrusion of Asia), the civilization had mastered the art of smelting copper.

Smelting is a type of extractive metallurgy, meaning processing a pure metal from the natural ore.

Another thing the early civilizations had learnt (independently at different places) was cold working (or work hardening) of the copper.

They would heat the copper to soften it and they would hammer it to the shape they would desire.

They could fashion sharp instruments out of this process like axe, knives, choppers which were great tools of meat processing, hunting and of course, warfare.

Wherever human apes or animals are, wars are never behind;
In all the animal kingdom no other species has organized and perfected the warfare and systematic mass killings like we have done.

As we "progress", this perfection keeps on getting better.

Another process that our early civilized (I use this term with lots of hesitation) ancestors had learnt was annealing.

They had found, by trial and error of course, that heating copper alters its chemical and physical properties.

Why it happened, they had no idea.

But we know, and hence u must know too.

The answer lies in the all powerful and predictive atomic theory.

The heating results in diffusion of atoms within the solid copper as the heat breaks the bonds which was maintaining the lattice structure.

Technically, the process of annealing reduces the Gibbs free energy.

But our ancestors were more busy in surviving, feeding, reproducing and warring than to go into science of understanding.

Much like we do today.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 20, 2016 Wednesday


Today my mother's lung condition and respiratory distress has taken a
sudden turn for the worst.

It is an acquired influenza infection which got transmitted from
my father.

We had to call our physician Dr. Harish Chaffle.

Currently she has put on triple oral antibiotics and steroid.

In case she will not improve by tomorrow, we will have to start
the drugs intravenously.

And i pray, please do NOT pray for her or for us.



Arranging the elements on the basis of atomic number not merely highlighted the periodicity of their chemical properties.

It also had a predictive power which is a hallmark of any successful scientific theory.

(Bear in mind that palmistry, astrology, numerology and other such nonsense have zero predictive power).

In addition to these 2 factors, arrangement of elements is also a reflection of their origins.

It is a pity that most school books or the teachers never take pains to reflect on this.

The 2 lightest elements number one and two are hydrogen and helium.

They are the most abundant elements in the universe.

Most of them were formed in the big bang (which is not a theory but a fact).

The next 3 elements are:
Number 3: Lithium
Number 4: Beryllium
Number 5: Boron

These 3 were formed mostly by cosmic ray spallation (more on it later).

Elements from 6 (Carbon) to 26 (Iron) are formed in stars and are continuing to form.

The process is called stellar nucleosynthesis and more on it will be story told later.

Elements with atomic number greater than 26, starting from Cobalt 27 are formed in the furnaces of massive supernovae.

This process is called supernova nucleosynthesis.

Today we know of 118 elements of which 94 are found on earth formed from the above mentioned 4 processes.

The remaining 24 have been produced by us apes like Technetium (43) and Plutonium (94).

All are unstable like us apes who are nothing but by product of years of time acting on star dust.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 19, 2016 Tuesday


In the hearing for anticipatory bail yesterday, the Sessions Court
has granted interim relief to Mr. Sanjay Veera.

He cannot be arrested till the date set for the hearing on
the anticipatory bail which is July 29th.

And if arrested, he has to be released on personal security of
Rs. 50,000.

Most likely, Mr. Sanjay Veera will get anticipatory bail on July 29th.
(Even though crime committed under Section IPC 307 in a non
bailable offense.)

Moreover, here is a classic case where the accused is powerful,
resourceful and wealthy enough to:

1. Tamper evidence

2. Hamper investigation

3. Is capable of committing the offense again, which is attempting
    yet  another murderous attack on me or my family member,
    thereby posing a threat to my or my family member's life

4. Commit an act of violence against prosecution witness or worse,
    bribe them. 

Quite a depressive scenario. 




Before we end, let us briefly revise the X-ray spectrometer that Moseley had devised.

1. A glass bulb electron tube which emitted high voltage electrons by the principle of thermionic emission.

2. These electrons were made to fire on very thin films of pure elements inside a evacuated vacuum tube.

3. This firing would lead to knocking off of the electrons from the inner shells of the atoms leading to their ionization.

4. Elements/atoms are unstable in their ionized forms.

5. These electron holes would be filled up by "falling" electrons of outside orbits.

6. This would lead to the release of energy in the form of X-ray photons.

7. These X-ray beams were lead out through this system and are made to be diffracted by a standardized salt crystal.

8. Lastly, these diffracted X-ray photons were made to fall on X-ray films to record the characteristic photographic lines.

9. Then using Bragg's law, basic mathematics and some guesswork regarding inter-atomic distance of the element, wavelengths of the emitted X-rays were calculated.

And now to his demise.

It was the madness and butchery of the World War I and temerity of this brilliant young mind that devoured him.

Against all his family and friends, Moseley volunteered himself in the British Army's Royal Engineers in 1914.

On August 10, 1915 he was shot through his head and killed in the Gallipoli Campaign, which was a battle being fought by the British Empire, the Russian Empire and France against the Ottoman Empire in modern Turkey.

The irony is that soon thereafter, in a span of just few decades, all the 3 empires would come to an end.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 18, 2016 Monday


The mastermind and the organizer of the attack on me Mr. Sanjay
Veera might be getting his bail today.

His bail fee to the lawyer itself was Rs. 3 lakhs.

As per the supreme court ruling, anybody charged under Section
307 of the Indian Penal Court can not be given an anticipatory
bail.

It would be interesting to see how the criminal law plays out.

To personally experience the criminal judiciary system is a whole
new experience.
  


So what did Moseley's experiments with metals of various elements on this ingenious apparatus reveal?

Each element was emitting X-rays of unique frequency.

With this data after multitudes of experimenting, he plotted a graph with the x axis as the square root of the emitted X-ray frequencies and the y axis as the atomic number of elements.

What do u think he got?

Yes Sir, a straight line!

To his surprise he had proved experimentally van den Broek's hypothesis.

This data made sense only if the positive charge in the nucleus of elements increased by exactly one unit as you go horizontally along the groups in the periodic table.

Moseley's Law as it later came to known also established for good that the atomic number is equal to the positive charge in the atomic nucleus.

Before Moseley's experiment, the concept of atomic number was rather loose and was not associated with any measurable physical quantity.

This was a landmark moment.

Adding a proton resulted in a new element.

Finally, the fundamental basis of elements and thereby the whole of chemistry was established.

By the way, did you know that Henry Moseley's research career spanned just 40 months?

Less than 4 years!!

I will not rest this story so easily for this forgotten genius's tragic death needs to be narrated.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 17, 2016 Sunday


Today I finally dared to do the most dreaded exercise, The Pull Ups.

Dreaded in the sense that it requires and recruits all the major muscles of upper back
and arms and forearms.

To my great relief and joy I was able to do 3 sets of 5 repetitions each.

It is amazing how strong the connective tissues laid down by the fibroblasts are.

Fibroblasts are cells that synthesize extracellular matrix and collagen which form
the structural framework of any organism.

The fibroblasts play a critical role in wound healing.

They are the factory for synthesizing collagen, glycosaminoglycans, reticular and
elastic fibres and glycoproteins found in the extracellular matrix. 


  

In 1913, when Moseley was just 26 and had moved to Oxford leaving both Rutherford and Manchester, Mendeleev's periodic table had turned 44.

Moseley noticed that the table had a basic bug (remember that it was based on atomic weight).

The place that the atomic weight assigned to an element did not always correspond to the chemical properties.

Meanwhile, a Dutch lawyer and  a greenhorn physicist by the name of Antonius van den Broek published a paper in "Nature" on July 20, 1911.

It was published just a month after Rutherford had published his 1911 landmark paper:
"The Scattering of alpha and beta particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom".

In that paper, Van den Broek put forth the idea of the direct correlation between the charge of an atomic nucleus and the position of element on the periodic table.

Rutherford had missed this completely.

This paper of van den Broek intrigued Moseley at Oxford.

Moseley had learnt from the father son Bragg duo that if high energy electrons were made to hit the solid metals (thin films of course), the solid emitted X-rays.

At Oxford, Moseley had laboratory but no funding (money).

His genius shone forth at this moment.

Within a short span of time he himself designed an apparatus to shoot high energy electrons at different chemical elements and measure the wavelengths of the emitted X-rays.

You can watch this remarkable apparatus and experiment by clicking on this link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTp9jAQpf7c

It is a moment worth pausing and contemplating on this apparatus setup.

It is a pity that an experiment so beautiful and so revolutionary is so little known or taught.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 16, 2016 Saturday

I forgot to thank one important group of people that were involved in my murder attempt
on June 22, 2016 Wednesday evening.   

It is the Crime Branch or the CID.

I still marvel at the fact that they did mange to crack open the case.

At one time, it was looking all so hopeless (when in hospital). 

With the CCTV camera right overhead at the crime scene not working and the police
failing to pick up the bike that I had hit in my getaway, it was looking bleak and dark.

Incredibly enough, the light came quite very early on the 5th day after the attack.

That was June 27, 2016 Monday.



Interestingly enough, just after one year with Rutherford at Manchester when he was offered further fellowship, Moseley declined.

Instead he moved to Oxford at the end of 1913 where he was given a laboratory but no support.
(Something like my position at the Wilmer Eye Institute in Baltimore in 2007-08).

But that is not to say that working under the Rutherford group was in vain.

Under Rutherford, it was inevitable that a scientist would work with radioactive elements as was the trend those days.

In 1912 at Manchester, Moseley attempted to pull back the beta particles (high energy electrons) from their radioactive source.

This sounded to me at first to be weird and quite silly.

But not to Moseley.

He was trying to prove Einstein's special theory of relativity experimentally by wanting to show that the mass increases with velocity.

He tried to hold back the beta particles by insulating the radium.

He hoped that insulation would make the residual uranium increasingly positive so that at the end the attractive force would prevent beta particles from leaving.

He had calculated that if the uranium could reach an electric potential of 1 million electron volts (MeV), the beta particles would be pulled back as they were emitted.

He was never able to produce this potential of 1 MeV to stop the beta particles.

However, he did manage to generate 150,000 volts or so on the radium, and thereby incidentally he created the first atomic battery!

An atomic battery is a devise that can generate electricity from the decay of an radioactive substance.

An atomic battery differs from a nuclear reactor in that it does not use a chain reaction.

These batteries are extremely expensive but have extremely long life and high energy density.

They are used as power sources for equipments that cannot be attended for long periods such as spacecrafts or closer home in cardiac pacemakers.

Anyway, this was not the primary reason for writing this bed-time story on Moseley.

We shall continue on Moseley hopefully tomorrow Sunday night assuming I do get time as I will be spending my entire day tomorrow on a cornea and oculoplasty CME.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 15, 2016 Friday

Today after a long long time I could do squats with the same weights as before the attack.

Moreover, I finally gathered the courage to try upper body workout.

I hit both the deltoids and the pectoralis with dumb bells.

Did not go heavy but felt the strength coming back.

       


Henry Moseley  who was always known as Harry by his family came from a wealthy and scientifically enlightened family of England.

He was born in 1887 to a biologist and professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Oxford when the British Empire was at its peak.

His father was also a member of the famous Challenger expedition of 1872-76 that was funded by the Royal Society.

That is another hallmark of a superpower nation state or an Empire.

It will invest in pure and fundamental research.

Just have a look at the 4 scientific goals of the Challenger expedition which sailed around the entire globe:

1. To investigate the physical conditions of the deep sea of the great oceanic basins such as depth, temperature, currents, specific gravity and light penetration.

2. To determine the chemical composition, organic constituents and suspended particles at various depths.

3. To ascertain the physical and chemical composition of deep sea deposits.

4. To investigate marine life on the sea floor and at the different depths.

This was a landmark oceanographic expedition that opened up an entire frontier of academic and research.

Moseley's mother interestingly was the daughter of a Welsh biologist and conchologist (somebody who studies mollusc shells which is an exoskeleton in contrast to endoskeleton of us apes).

So Moseley had a perfect background of an educated family of a powerful world empire at the time when scientific discoveries were transforming Europe, England and the United States.

Inspite of all his biological background, destiny would have him landed in 1910 at the age of 23 in the laboratory of none other than the great Ernest Rutherford.

At the University of Manchester.

We shall continue our journey with this fascinating young man who had the world class experimentalist as his supervisor.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 17 - proxying for Navsky, who's getting used to what he's lately started calling 'freedom' - freedom of an unbandaged, unfettered, unstapled Nobility!


Interestingly enough, just after one year with Rutherford at Manchester when he was offered further fellowship, Moseley declined.

Instead he moved to Oxford at the end of 1913 where he was given a laboratory but no support.
(Something like my position at the Wilmer Eye Institute in Baltimore in 2007-08).

But that is not to say that working under the Rutherford group was in vain.

Under Rutherford, it was inevitable that a scientist would work with radioactive elements as was the trend those days.

In 1912 at Manchester, Moseley attempted to pull back the beta particles (high energy electrons) from their radioactive source.

This sounded to me at first to be weird and quite silly.

But not to Moseley.

He was trying to prove Einstein's special theory of relativity experimentally by wanting to show that the mass increases with velocity.

He tried to hold back the beta particles by insulating the radium.

He hoped that insulation would make the residual uranium increasingly positive so that at the end the attractive force would prevent beta particles from leaving.

He had calculated that if the uranium could reach an electric potential of 1 million electron volts (MeV), the beta particles would be pulled back as they were emitted.

He was never able to produce this potential of 1 MeV to stop the beta particles.

However, he did manage to generate 150,000 volts or so on the radium, and thereby incidentally he created the first atomic battery!

An atomic battery is a devise that can generate electricity from the decay of an radioactive substance.

An atomic battery differs from a nuclear reactor in that it does not use a chain reaction.

These batteries are extremely expensive but have extremely long life and high energy density.

They are used as power sources for equipments that cannot be attended for long periods such as spacecrafts or closer home in cardiac pacemakers.

Anyway, this was not the primary reason for writing this bed-time story on Moseley.

We shall continue on Moseley hopefully tomorrow Sunday night assuming I do get time as I will be spending my entire day tomorrow on a cornea and oculoplasty CME.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 14, 2016 Thursday

It is exactly 3 weeks since my tendon repair surgery that
took place on the wee hours of June 23, 2016 Thursday. 

Yet again I must thank my doctor Dr. Anshuman Manaswi M.Ch.
Plastic Surgery for operating upon me urgently.

I must thank all the unnamed nurses, hospital staff and medical
science for saving my hand.

My hand could easily have been lost due to sepsis/gangrene
or worse I could have died due to tetanus.

Science and all the men who have worked on it, all the men
and women on whom i write and who are the source of my 
writings have helped me even after their death.

This important fact must never NEVER be forgotten mon ami. 

Today all my bandages, splints, plasters have come off.

The feeling of freedom is hard to describe mon ami.

I still do not have complete movement of my right hand.

I am unable to completely flex and make a fist out of my right hand.

Though i can oppose my thumb to all the fingers.




Today I wanted to write on the third of the protagonist in the story of the elements.

For it was he who firmly established the one to one (almost like Georg Cantor's set theory) relationship between the atomic number and the position of the elements on the periodic table.

His predecessors Jons Jacob Berzelius and Dmitri Mendeleev had both used atomic weights instead.

Yet, I must not hurry but lay some basic foundations on the idea of X-ray spectroscopy and characterization of elements using this technique.

Now you surely must have noticed by now, even if you are an average observer like me, that different chemicals burn with different colours.

These colours are explained by the all powerful atomic theory of electrons bouncing up and down the different shells or energy levels.

If you recall, the father and son duo of William Lawrence Bragg and William Henry Bragg were the original pioneers of X-ray emission spectroscopy.

The underlying fact of spectroscopy is this:

When materials are exposed to short wavelength X-rays, their atoms tend to get ionized.

This means that the X-rays hitting the atoms knock of tightly held electrons in the inner orbits.

Technically this happens when the energy of the incoming radiation is greater than the ionization potential.

This makes the atom unstable.

For stability sake, (Now don't ask me why atoms "wish" to be stable. As Feynman had said we can only know how nature behaves and not why) electrons in the higher orbits "fall" in the lower orbit to fill up this electron hole.

(As aside one can do a whole story on this topic of electron hole).

In falling, energy is released as photons that is very very characteristic of each element.

Henry Moseley was a pioneer in using X-ray spectroscopy to study the atoms of elements.

The devise that he built is remarkable and is still preserved at the Oxford museum of science.

We shall continue the story of this remarkable and yet so little known English physicist.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 13, 2016 Wednesday

Fearing infection in the dorsum of the hand, started
Tab Cefuroxime 500 mg BD

This drug prevents bacteria from synthesizing their cell wall.

It specifically blocks synthesis of peptidoglycan in the cell wall.

But does it do so?

By mimicry, the oldest weapon the warfare.

The last step of synthesis of peptidoglycan involves cross-linking
at D-alanine-D-alanine end of peptides.

Cefuroxime mimics this sequence and thereby mistakenly 
the protein binding protein gets to working with this molecule
rather than the originally intended peptidoglycan precursors 
of the bacterial cell wall.   



Dmitri Mendeleev in his landmark presentation of 1869 made the following 8 assertions:

1. The elements when arranged according to their atomic weights exhibit a periodicity (something that repeats itself).

2. Elements that have similar chemical properties either have similar atomic weights or exhibit atomic weight of regular increments.

3. The arrangement of elements that were grouped according to their atomic weights corresponds to their valencies.
Eg. Li, Be, B, C, N, O, and F

4. The elements that are most widely diffused in nature have small atomic weights.
(Here we have a hint of stellar nucleosynthesis and the big bang).

5. The magnitude of the atomic weight determines the character of the element.

6. Discovery of unknown elements is to be expected by the gaps in his table.
(Example. 2 elements similar to aluminum and silicon whose atomic weights lie between 65 and 75).

This was the ultimate strength of his periodic table!

7. The atomic weight of an element may need to be changed by the knowledge of its adjacent elements.

(He was referring to Tellurium 52 which is surrounded by Selenium 34 above and Polonium 84 below).

8. Certain chemical properties can be predicted from their atomic weights.

This was the moment of prescient synthesis which can be equalled to Newton's understanding of gravity as the same force that makes the apple falls and moon to orbit the earth.

Mendeleev soon thereafter published his version of the periodic table.

Mendeleev had high esteem for the Sanskrit grammarians (Panini of the 4th century BC in particular) of ancient India and to show his appreciation he gave Sanskrit names and prefixes to the missing elements.

He used the prefixes eka, dvi, and tri (Sanskrit one, two, three) in naming these unknowns.

Some say that the similarities between the periodic table and Panini's phonological patterning of sounds is remarkably striking.

Panini's grammar is the world's first formal system developed centuries before the formal mathematical logic whose foundations were laid by the German mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege in early 1900s.

Fascinating stuff, isn't it mon ami?

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 12, 2016 Tuesday

By the time Mendeleev had become a tenured professor and a full time teacher of chemistry, 56 elements were already known.

Moreover, newer elements were being discovered at a rate of almost one per year.

It was a scene somewhat similar to today's particle physics where we have a bunch of elementary particles and more of them keep coming forth sometimes upsetting the so called "Standard Model".

One can say that the position of elementary particles today is quite similar to the status of elements in mid 1800s.

(Mind you, this is coming from an average ape specialized in eye diseases. So be skeptical.)

Chaos reigned.

There was no proper classification or order.

What he did was the card trick.

He took paper cards and wrote on them their atomic weights and valence with their chemical properties.

It is your homework to find out what is valence if you have forgotten so.

He immediately noticed a pattern emerging which he claimed to have envisioned in a dream.

(You usually tend to dream on the problem you are obsessed with.

Nothing magical about it).

Mendeleev is supposed to have said:
"I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required.

Awakening, I immediately wrote it on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction seem necessary."

On March 6, 1869 at the age of 35, Mendeleev presented his table to the Russian Chemical Society.

The title of the paper was:
"The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements".

I shall elaborate further on this seminal paper/presentation which was yet another landmark moment in the history of one of the great apes.

Just to let you know another interesting fact about elements and our ape bodies.

The composition of human body in terms of abundance of elements very closely resembles  the sea water...
Save for additional stores of carbon, nitrogen necessary to form the proteins and ribonucleic acids.

A little sprinkling of phosphorus has been added to manufacture that all important energy transferring molecule ATP (adenosine triphosphate).

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 11, 2016 Monday

Attended consumer forum alone against Rizwan the builder



Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was born in 1834 in a small hamlet somewhere in Siberia.

He was the youngest of the 15 or more siblings of his family (the sheer number is frightening!).

His father was a teacher of fine arts who first became blind and later died when Mendeleev was just a small boy.

His mother was forced to work and she tried to start the glass factory which their family once owned.

Luck again ran out as the factory was destroyed and gutted by a fire.

In 1849, when Mendeleev was just 15 years old, his mother took him across the entire breath of Russia from Siberia to Moscow for his higher education.

What a mother!

Bad luck again struck them when the University of Moscow refused to accept him.

His mother took him to Saint Petersburg and got him admitted there at the Main Pedagogical Institute.

And it was here that he did his graduation and also managed to contract tuberculosis.

Somehow, without any anti Koch's treatment, he survived this malady by taking a break at at Crimean Peninsula near the Black Sea.

He went on later to do his masters and PhD in chemistry.

By 1871, at the age of 34 he had transformed Saint Petersburg (both the Technological Institute and the State University) into an internationally recognized center for research in chemistry.

But what did he actually did to enhance our understanding of elements?

I think we neither have time nor the space to deal with it today.

Let this strange planet that this tilted 23.4° away from the perpendicular of its orbital plane make yet another rotation.

Just by the way, earth's rotation is an important hint or clue that almost 5 billion years ago our solar system formed from cloud and dust, collapsing, flattening and rotating faster and faster like an ice skater who spins faster and faster as she brings her arms in.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 10, 2016 Sunday

Today I drove to the gym and did squats after 3 weeks

Both the quadriceps and the knee joint felt very weak

Was unable to go down low below the knee level


As you see, the notion or the definition of the element was not rather loose.

So how did the link between atomic number and the definition of element get established?

Perhaps we can attribute 3 men to establish this crucial link.

They all came from different countries:

1. Jons Jacob Berzelius in early 1800s hailed from Sweden

2. Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev in late 1800s from the Russian Empire

3. Henry Moseley in early 1900s an Englishman

Berzelius had lost both his parents at an early age.

Under the care of his relatives, he did his studies to become a medical doctor in 1802 from the Uppsala University (ranks 60 among the World Universities).

Oddly enough, from his career as a physician, he started to devote more time on physical chemistry.

He began to determine atomic weights of elements thereby on the way established the principles of stoichiometry.

In essence, he had founded the law of conservation of mass in a chemical reaction.

This essentially meant that the total mass of the reactants had to be equal to the total mass of the products if no energy was lost as heat or light.

Example:
CH₄ + 2O₂ ~ CO₂ + 2H₂O
(Sorry for my inability to write numbers in subscript).

This is an extremely powerful idea from which a lot else automatically follows if taken to its complete logical end.

Berzelius, to aid his experiments, developed a system of alphabetical notation for the elements such as O for oxygen, Fe for iron with numbers to show their proportions.

We still use them today.

Yet we have never heard of this great doctor and chemist called Berzelius.

What hope does an average ape has of being remembered after his disorganization of atomic arrangement?

None!

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 09, 2016 Saturday

Very Busy OPD

We have been discussing atoms, subatomic particles and electromagnetic waves for quite some time.

I hope by now you can appreciate that at atomic levels the stuff is mostly empty space.

Also, at atomic scale, nature behaves in a bizarre way that it seems to act both as a particle and waves.

This is the least we as average apes need to be aware of.

Let us now go to the next level in the hierarchy of nature:
The Elements.

In a way, you can argue that we are shifting from physics to chemistry though in fact, there is no sharp boundary between them.

Much akin to the fact that there is nothing really to separate our early ancestors of genus Homo from the members of Pan.

The concept of elements as we know of today is immensely different from how the wise men 10,000 years ago thought them to be.

Ancient philosophers of most cultures considered earth, water, air and fire to be the essential elements that constitute the nature.

Aristotle in 350 BC even introduced a fifth element called aether which formed the heavens.

Even as late as in 1600s, great scientific minds such as Robert Boyle (whose relationship describing the inverse relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas is legendary) had very little idea of elements.

It was probably the Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier in late 1700s who can be credited to first enlist the elements in a closer fashion as we know today.

His list published in 1789 as:
Elements of Chemistry
contained 33 elements.

The list even included light and caloric.

The greatest progress was in the fact that he had discarded the age old classical elements earth, air, fire and water.

By the way, have u wondered how Lavoisier died?

No Sir, not of old age or consumption or the wretched  plague so common in Europe those days.

He was executed by guillotine at the height of the French Revolution.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 08, 2016 Friday

After the war, Chadwick once again met his mentor Hans Geiger at a conference in Cambridge in 1928.

(Little did these 2 men knew at that time that their nations were going to go at each others throat even more fiercely yet again).

Geiger gifted Chadwick with his latest version of Geiger counter that was far more effective than manual counting of scintillations on a zinc sulphide screen.

This new Geiger counter was capable of detecting all the 3 alpha, beta and gamma forms of radiation.

Meanwhile in Germany under the Nazi, Walther Bothe and his student Herbert Becker on bombarding beryllium with alpha particles from polonium had produced an unusual form of penetrating radiation.

Chadwick wanted to be sure.

So he now asked his student Hugh Webster to repeat and verify the findings of Walther Bothe and Herbert Becker.

Hugh Webster obediently obliged.

This set Chadwick's heart beat racing.

He at once was struck with the idea that this could be the evidence for what he and Rutherford had been contemplating for years: the neutron.

Then in January of 1932, Chadwick was drawn to another startling result.

The Curies (you must be expert on them by now) had succeeded in knocking of protons from paraffin wax using these very same unknown penetrating rays.

Or at least they thought so.

This small mistake of theirs' would probably cost them a Nobel Prize (not that they were short of it).

Chadwick and Rutherford knew it could not have been protons that were knocked off from the paraffin wax; they were too heavy for that.

It had to be neutrons!

Chadwick dropped everything else and devoted his full energy in proving the existence of the neutrons.

He devised an apparatus which combined all the above experiments.

Using Polonium as the source of alpha particles, he bombarded them into beryllium foil.

The resulting radiation was directed at paraffin wax.

The displaced particles were made to pass into the Geiger-Muller counter or a ionization chamber where they would be detected with an oscilloscope.

Just after experimenting for 2 weeks, he quickly (like Curie) sent a letter to Nature in February 1932 titled:
"Possible Existence of a Neutron".

In May of 1932, he published a detailed paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society titled:
"The Existence of a Neutron".

Chadwick's smartness and insight beat so many physicists to earn a place in the history of  the greatest discoveries.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 07, 2016 Thursday

Rutherford thanks to path breaking experiments of Geiger and Marsden came to the conclusion that atom consisted of a central small massive nucleus with a positive charge surrounded by a much larger cloud of negatively charged electrons.

But one disparity was nagging him.

There was a mismatch between the atomic number/number of positive charges in the nucleus with the mass of the nucleus they were getting in their experiments.

How to explain this?

For this he proposed that besides the normal protons in the nucleus there were other neutralized protons in the nucleus.

There neutralized protons were neutralized by closely bounded electrons WITHIN the nucleus.

This theory could also explain the phenomenon of beta radiation which is emission of electrons from the nucleus of the atom.

Hence throughout the 1920s, the physicists assumed that the nucleus of an atom consisted of protons and "nuclear electrons".

I know, with the benefit of hindsight, it appears laughable.

But the whole point of my narratives is to show you mon ami, how scientific knowledge accrues.

At that time a very very strange  Englishman by the name of Paul Dirac formulated an astounding equation.

His equation describes the behavior of elementary particles called fermions (quarks and leptons).

Just for your information, the term fermion was coined by Paul Dirac after another genius Enrico Fermi.

He was modest enough not to have named fermion as Diracle or Diracion which he could well have as he was the supreme Englishman at the era when the British Empire still reigned supreme.

The Dirac equation also implied or predicted the existence of antimatter, theoretical physics at its best.

Along with this, another set of interesting data was coming in from the Nazi Germany from experiments being conducted by Walther Bothe.

Note that the United States even as late as 1930s was nowhere close to Europe as far as particle physics were concerned.

They were more concerned pragmatically with "useful" stuff such as electricity, wireless telegraphy and communication.

South Asia of course was more busy on deciding how the Hindus, Muslims and different castes needed to be segregated.

We shall continue this interesting tale in the nights to come.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 06, 2016 Wednesday

Staples and sutures removed

POD 13

Now Chadwick was stuck in the enemy nation when the first world war broke out.

Just imagine yourself as an Indian getting stuck in Islamabad when Indo-Pakistan war breaks out.

He was mercifully not killed or executed but transferred to the Ruhleben internment camp near Berlin.

Chadwick showed his love for physics by setting up a laboratory in the stables and conducting experiments with improvised materials such as radioactive toothpaste.

It is remarkable that even under these onerous conditions he along with another English detainee Charles Drummond Ellis undertook scientific experiments on the photochemical process!!

But it was his work with Hans Geiger on beta radiation that would later on bring him fame.
(Mark mon ami that there was no hatred among these scientists who came from the opposite warring camps).

Chadwick using Geiger counter demonstrated that the beta radiation did not produce discrete lines as had been previously thought but rather a continuous spectrum with peaks in certain regions.

I as an ophthalmologist of course cannot explain the significance of this anomaly.

This continuous spectrum remained unexplained for a very long time.

In fact, Einstein once on a visit to Hans Geiger's laboratory told Chadwick:

"I can explain either of these things, but I can't explain both at the same time."

Remember mon ami, anything that does not fit a theory is deeply disconcerting to a true scientist.

A true and a great scientist will probably devote his whole life in trying to find a scientific explanation for an anomaly.

This is yet another reason why such incredible mind rise above ordinary apes like me.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

July 05, 2016 Tuesday

The mother of James Chadwick was an unknown domestic servant (From now on I will have a far greater respect for them).

His father was a cotton spinner.

Thus Chadwick was born in 1891 in Cheshire, North West England to parents with no "status" in a society where that mattered utmost.

When he was just 4, both his parents moved to Manchester, leaving him under the care of his maternal grandparents.

His parents could barely afford for his education even though he won scholarships.

Like any smart kid, he had wanted to study maths but by mistake enrolled himself in physics.

It was at the age of 17 in 1908 that he first brushed across Rutherford at the Victoria University of Manchester.

He would walk 6.4 kilometers to the university and back everyday.

Rutherford gave Chadwick the project of comparing the radioactive energy of 2 sources.

Chadwick devised his own method to do so and thus published his first paper with Rutherford as the coauthor at the age of 21 in 1912.

He also got his Bachelor's degree with first class honours.

Within another year, he published another paper on the absorption of gamma rays by various gases and liquids.

This paper had no coauthor and for this he was awarded his MSc (Master of Science) degree in 1912.

Another year and he won a scholarship that allowed him to study and do research in any university in Europe.

Remember, in early 1900s, Europe and specially Germany was the United States of today where cutting edge research took place.

Chadwick chose to study beta radiation under non other than Hans Geiger whose brilliant experiments we had been following for over a week.

Not soon after whrn Chadwick set foot on the German soil, the madness of the first world war broke out.

We shall continue with Chadwick's life in nights to come.

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Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.