![]() These "electrons" (everybody else's word) were truly remarkable. earned his Nobel Prize: These "corpuscles" (his word) were about 2,000 times smaller than hydrogen, the lightest known element and therefore the smallest atom. ![]() And it also meant that cathode rays were made of the same stuff as electricity.īy comparing the amount of ray deflection in the electric fields versus in the magnetic fields, Thomson could derive some math and work out some properties of these charges. Fascinating! That meant that the glowy bit was connected to the charges themselves if the light was somehow separate from the charges, then it would sail straight on through, regardless of the field interference. The cathode ray would bend under the influence of both electric and magnetic fields. If charges were somehow involved in this cathode ray business, then you'd better believe they'd listen to those fields.Īnd listen they did. What made the glow? How were charges - which, at the time, were known to be linked to the concept of electricity but otherwise mysterious - connected to that glow? Thomson cracked the code by a) making the best dang vacuum tube that anyone ever had and b) shoving the whole apparatus inside superstrong electric and magnetic fields. This phenomenon raised questions for physicists. If you stick a couple electrodes inside a glass tube, suck all the air out of the tube, then crank up the voltage on the electrodes, you get an effervescent glow that appears to emanate from one of the electrodes, the cathode, to be exact. In the late 1800s, he become enraptured with ghostly beams of light known as cathode rays. Operating in parallel with Einstein was a wonderfully gifted experimentalist by the name of J.J. These "united states"Īnd just when people were getting comfortable with the size of these minuscule morsels of matter, thinking that these had to be the smallest things possible, someone came along to complicate it. In other words, Einstein gave us a way to weigh an atom. And by putting this connection on solid mathematical ground, he was able to provide a pathway for going from something you can see (how much the grain moves around in a given amount of time) to something you can't (the mass of the particles of the fluid). By treating the fluid as something composed of atoms, he was able to derive a formula for how much the innumerable collisions from the fluid particles would nudge that grain around. And after a few carefully executed experiments, Brown realized that this has nothing to do with air or fluid currents.īrownian motion was just one of those random unexplained facts of life, but Einstein saw in that a clue. If you drop a large grain inside a fluid, the object tends to wiggle and jump around completely on its own. He was interested, in particular, by the problem of Brownian motion, first described way back in 1827 by Robert Brown (hence the name). Just like all the other physics that he became a fan of, Einstein revolutionized them. This was pretty compelling, and Albert Einstein was a big fan of these kinds of physics. ![]() For example, "temperature" really measures the average motion of all those gas particles hitting your thermometer, transferring their energy to it. In order to understand how heat engines worked - along with all the attendant concepts like temperature, pressure and entropy - physicists realized that they could view gases and fluids as if they were composed of a nearly numberless quantity of tiny, even microscopic, particles. One clue to the existence of atoms came from the newly established studies of thermodynamics. How could you prove the existence of something you couldn't directly observe? One of the most challenging things about it, however, was that if atoms really existed, they were way, way too small to see. Teeming massesĪ hundred years later, this "atomic" theory of matter didn't seem completely nonsensical. If matter was ultimately indivisible, if it was made of atoms, then only simple proportions and ratios would be allowed when combining elements. Dalton found only simple proportions, everywhere, in all cases. Or with twice or three times the other element. Instead, he found that a certain amount of one element might combine with an equal amount of another element.
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