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.
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.
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