FAQ: History, Nuclear 000.0001

[Richard Hull]

This may be a quick rinse, but a start at getting the totally un-informed up to speed on the origins of nuclear stuff. The history of this science is fascinating and reveals as much about the science itself and why the science got started or advanced.

This is very important in the trail of your belief in the very system, itself. Unless,of course, you wish to join thousands of others in the fete of belief for belief's sake because you are being taught that this is so and to take it as fact because everyone else does and you won't graduate unless you believe.

The history assures us, hopefully, that the strange thing we are learning is viable out of necessity or out of a need to advance fresh ideas from amazing new discoveries where no science existed before. It lets you personally judge the rectitude to the path of advancement through a oneness with the discoverers.

To accept teaching without background or a detailed history of what is being taugh as "gospel" is like wandering off into la-la land with Penelope.

I hope to paint with a broad brush and will not hit every important person or event but should interest a few here in much more reading on the history of science. I might undertake this as a series here. We will see.

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The atom and molecule

This concept goes way back, but the Greek philosphers toyed with the idea of an ultimate smallness in matter where no further sub-division is possible. The whole thing got dropped, effectively, until the 18th century as chemistry started to develop and the idea of molecules related to reactions of the elements in chemical form were studied. A satisfactory shell was built that allowed chemists to actually start to get a handle on how matter at this level interacted.

Electrical experiments as early as the late 1700's hinted that matter could acquire or might even have electrical charge associated with it. It would be the middle of the 19th century before more solid evidence began to collect.

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The electrical nature of matter

The chemists already had electricity tied into matter through hydrolysis/electrolytic reactions in chemistry, linking charge to matter by the 1850's. However, for physics, a real clue came with the early investigations of cathode rays and other phenomena associated with electrical discharges in rarified gases. This exploratory work ranged from the 1870's up to 1890 with Sir William Crooks leading the way. He published extensively on what he termed "radiant matter".

Again, science lagged woefully behind here as giesler tubes, paddle wheel tubes, canal ray tubes, radiometers and the like were in all the London and European shops for sale before the physicists had a clue. The engineers and technicians had cobbled together that which functioned and improved on what was not understood.

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That glorious decade of repeated and constant discovery.

The brief instant of time 1890-1900 might well be remembered as the decade that separated epochs in man's understanding. Similar to the transistion from the bronze age into the iron age, but happening as a lightning stroke over the affairs of man by comparison, temporally.

The names of the great pile up in this decade like a huge scientific traffic jam. But three names and related stunning discoveries prove so pivotal and related that the world would change forever starting with the next decade.

These are stories about literally scientific dabbling in areas little understood that had one after the other of the discovers trip over something new. Each would admit to having no idea as to what the mechansims were that they discovered, but they did know that their findings portended greater knowledge in the offing. Not one of them knew just how great his discovery truly would be or how many of his bretheren his work would put in motion to likewise bungle onto new ground while trying to define the unknown ground he was just standing on prior to his newer and ever more strange discovery! They would set in motion a scientific juggernaught that would be like the proverbial snowball that would, within a short 50 years, unleash powers and forces that they, themselves, had no knowledge of or could even imagine!

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Xrays - Look Ma...no hands

The first batter up is Wilhelm Roengten. In 1895 Roentgen, like many scientists of his day had the obligatory cathode ray tube setup. Roentgen set out to casually study and report on some characteristics of Crooks "radiant matter". Crooks' work had already spread over Europe due to his superb and novel demonstartions and writings. Without telling all the exciting details of his stumbling over the x-rays, we will just note that Roentgen found that some form of energy was penetrating solid matter outside of his cathode ray apparatus.

With typical Germanic thoroughness and an anally retentive attitude, he played with his discovery for a rather long period. He finally published his work and detailed investigations in a small pamphlet just before X-mas 1895. His work really wasn't recognized until January of 1896 when all the people he had mailed his pamphlet to had returned from holiday.

Nearly instantly, everyone had a glass blower make them an X-ray tube. By 1900 you could literally order your own x-ray set from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue while physicists were still scratching their collective balding pates.

The X-ray pamphlet was reprinted in that same January by the thousands! X-rays sparked, within the next month or two, a flurry of activity that was gut wrenching by the Victorian standards of science.
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That little French guy - Radioactivity

Henri Bequerel, Like his father before him, had his scientific reputation built on the study of phosphors. For whereas the Germans had the glorious aniline dyes to their credit, the French owned the phosphors end of chemistry.

Within weeks of Roengten's announcement, Bequerel had formed the hair-brained notion that since Roentgen had used a phosphor screen to observe the rays then, perhaps, a phosphor, itself, might be a scource for these X-rays needing only to be activated by light! His logic being, that as some phosphors could glow following excitation in the optical range, then perhaps some might also emit this unseen x-radiation.

It just so happens that a number of Uranium compounds are superb phosphors and were already well known.

X-rays penetrated matter and exposed photographic plates. Bequerel made up a number of phosphor screens including uranium phosphor ones. He exposed them to the sun for activation and then laid them on the plates. None, including the uranium one, exposed the film. It was looking grim for his idea. Unfortunately, some consecutive cloudy days occurred and he had left some unexcited screens in the drawer with plates awaiting exposure. After a week, he got confused and couldn't remember whether he had exposed the plates and screens or not and so he developed the plates. The one near the uranium screen was dimly, but convincingly exposed. He suddenly realized that his x-ray phosphor was just too weak to expose a plate as rapidly as an x-ray tube. Over a tumultuous month, he reported after re-doing all his work that, alas, only uranium phosphors emitted x-rays. Scooping his own work just weeks later, he announced, somewhat stunned, that metallic uranium and all uranic compounds also emitted x-rays. Of course, others would soon show that these were not x-rays.

It would be Diberne and Marie Curie who starting throwing everything from hog slop to table salt on photographic plates to simultaneously announce that thorium and its compounds also emitted the penetrating rays. All of this was done in 1896.

1896 was a killer year for science and a thousand ships were launched on a thousand missions for science as eveyone who was anyone was fishing for the scraps that fell from the tables of Roentgen and Bequerel. Little did anyone know that those scraps, when fully collected, would feed the many assembled "on the mount".

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The first piece of matter - the electron

The Englishman, Thompson, was convinced that the radiant energy in the cathode ray tubes was acutally matter particles just as was Crooks. Crooks was a chemist by profession. Thompson, who was a physicist, set about in 1898 to determine some characteristics of these cathode rays, mostly to try and help figure out what the hell x-rays were!

What he found and reported in that same year was an inconceivably small piece of matter that had a fixed and specific negative charge associated with it. He determined that these charged pellets of mater were streaming off of the negative electrode in all such tubes and that x-rays resulted from the collisions of these "electrons", as he called them, with a positive metal plate in the same tube.

Certainly, this was stunning and it looked like the electron was the key to unlocking the mystery of matter and was the charge arbiter of chemistry (which it ultimately was found to be). Still it would be two more decades before poor physics would have a convincing handle on x-rays and yet another beyond that before radioactivity made any real sense! Again, the engineers and technicians, medicos, customs agents, etc would be using and working with perfected and advanced x-ray apparatus long before the physicists had a clue about what was going on.

Technology was, indeed, far out in front of science.

The same was true with the radioactivity of Bequerel. Crooks would invent the spinthariscope and it would be under many a Victorian-Era christmas tree as a present for inquisitive school boy. Radium would be used for cancer treatment before the discovery of the proton or neutron or the first, simple, Bohr-Sommerfield hydrogen atom model.

In spite of the embarrassment associated with the tail of technology wagging the supposed dog of physics, scientists were having a feeding frenzy! Under each onion skin layer peeled back in radiation physics and the study of the atomic structure, a whole new patch of onions were invariably found and many a famous future name would get his doctorate due to his work with fresh onions.

It must be remembered that each of our three men more or less blundered onto his discovery while looking for something else.

The greatest name in modern experimental physics would soon arise and, under his benevolent and kind tutelage, literally hundreds of Phds would ultimately blossom and scurry out into the world to mold the future. This is part of a later tale.

Richard Hull

[Starfire]

Enthraling and valued as ever Richard - Thank you.

[Q]

yes, very enlightening. all i was ever taught was that [name] discovered [thing] and when. no explaination how or why.
i look foward to the next installment

Q

[DaveC]

Having taught Physics and Electronics, I can agree that many times it seems all anyone is interested to know, is who, what and when.. all good questions, mind you, but the experiments that went before this... are actually far more important.

Frequently, the hard questions such as why a particular result from an experiment establishes a particular result are left to advanced course to unfold. Courses that most never get to take.

Thanks for the interesting review Richard, this is a fascinating period of discovery.

Dave Cooper

[Richard Hull]

Thanks for the kudos guys.

For those lusting after the whole tale, no book I have ever read really gets it right across the board. However, Alfred Romer's introductions of 30-50 pages in length to his two Dover paperbacks on radioactivity and radiochemistry are the best ever placed in print. He was one of the last of a great group of learned men who new the value of scientific history and was fortunate enough to know how to spin the tale so you can't put his work down until the tale is told. Rare indeed is such a wealth of useful, and excitingly told history found that establishes so firm a foundation in this area.

Note*** such a history is amazingly much more interesting and exciting if you have dabbled a bit in it already. For, as you delve deeper and experiment actively, only then, do you wonder, "how th' hell did they ever noodle all this s--- out!"

The answer is all in Romer's books! When you read and realize that the instrumentalities of the day were so dreadful and the ultimate processes used to devine this jumble so inspired, it restores your faith in man, his inate abilities and the value of true inspired genius and empiricism.

This story leaves any modern day tales of science, deep in the dust.

So much bungling around, so much luck of the draw and so much caprice that had it not been for a delay and interuption of experiment caused by a christmas holiday, a major discovery might have been put off five years or more. It is all for the reading in Romer's exciting intros.

Books By Alfred Romer

Radioactivity and the discovery of Transmutation - superb
Radiochemistry and the discovery of Isotopes - my favorite
The Restless Atom. - general populace

Richard Hull