October 14, 2016 Friday
Bedtime Story
Bengt Strömgren provokes Hans Bethe with a Problem
Edward Teller, another Hungarian mathematical physicist
who first left Hungary in 1926 (sick of communism) and later Hitler’s Germany
in 1933 (fed up with fascism and antisemitism) to breath the free air of
America, convinced Bethe to come for this annual conference.
Hans Bethe did go finally.
At the conference, one of the speakers was Bengt Strömgren,
a Danish astronomer and an astrophysicist, a man even whose father was a
professor of astronomy at the University of Copenhagen and the director of its
observatory.
He was born in Gothenburg, Sweden but was brought up in
his father’s mansion in Copenhagen surrounded by visiting scientists, scholars,
professors and guests.
He published his first paper at the age of 14, when I was
playing marbles in some filthy by lanes of my birth town.
Nobody more could have had his childhood so totally
immersed in astronomy than Bengt Strömgren.
One of the many contributions that Strömgren made to
astrophysics was determining the composition of the stars which was way
different from the ones proposed by his predecessors.
He put forth his version of the stellar composition at
this very conference of theoretical physics which Bethe was quiet reluctant to
attend.
Strömgren after his presentation threw down the
gauntlet to the audience demanding from any one of them to come up with an
explanation for it.
God hypothesis was nowhere in the contention mon ami.
The great George Gamow along with the German Carl Weizsäcker had
come up with the proton-proton chain reaction in a paper that they jointly
published in 1937.
The proton proton-proton chain reaction happens in 2
steps.
Step 1 involves fusion of 2 protons to form diproton or
Helium-2.
+
|
→
|
+
|
Step 2 is the positron emission or beta plus decay
where a proton inside the nucleus of diproton is converted into a neutron
releasing a positron and an electron neutrino.
→
|
+
|
+
|
The only problem with this explanation was that it was
unable to explain the synthesis of elements heavier than helium which
observations were showing.
What do you think did Hans Bethe do?
Did he go to one of those pubs and drank that evening
of the conference probably paid for by Cornell University?
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.
Another great educator and teacher that I am aware of is Professor
Subhashish in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, he actually does and teaches real
mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All
his books can be downloaded for free through this link.
For
entertainment may I suggest Kids Songs channel.
Bengt Strömgren leaving the Yerkes Observatory (at Williams Bay, Wisconsin operated by University of Chicago) . Behind him is Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
The 1938 Washington Conference of Theoretical Physics had stellar luminaries (pun intended) with the likes of George Gamow, Donald Menzel, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and even John von Neumann on the subject "Stellar Energy Generation".
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