This was never forecast two months ago, nor was it forecast 20 years ago, but we know to the hundredth decimal point the global temperature in 2118 (57.82 degrees Fahrenheit).
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The Market
On another note, TSLA crashes through the $310 floor. Late last week the CNBC "Fast Money" folks heartily recommended TSLA. Whatever.
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Notes to the Granddaughters
From Convergence: The Idea At The Heart of Science, Peter Watson, c. 2016
I think this is my third entry regarding this book. One can do a search for the other entries.
This note will be from Chapter 3: Beneath the Pattern of the Elements
Arianna (the oldest granddaughter) and I have spent a lot of time together on the periodic table. She knows it as well as anyone her age.
"Atomic weight" is now a historical term. Relative atomic mass is preferred these days.
A raft of priority disputes: who first noticed the periodicity of the natural elements; the intervals appeared to recur at multiples of eight of hydrogen.
- Mendeleyev: born in Siberia Russia; mother and son moved to Moscow, then to St Petersburg
- 1855: qualified as a teacher; took gold medal for the best student of his year
- government grant to Paris, to study under Henri Regnault, the man who first established that absolute zero was -273 degrees Celsius
- then to Heidelberg, where he worked with Robert Bunsen (of Bunsen burner fame) and Gustav Kirchhoff (who between them [Kirchhoff and Bunsen] developed spectroscopy, using a prism to refract light) -- when an element is heated, the light it emitted produced its own characteristic spectrum of colors
- returned to St Petersburg in 1861 (about the time of the US civil war); realized he was virtually alone in Russia in being up to data on discoveries in chemistry
- while writing his textbook, noted the periodicity while putting some notes on the back of an envelope (true, no apocryphal)
- worked three days, three nights without sleeping; fell asleep; dream led to the Periodic Table of Elements
- two bold claims
- where atomic weight of elements did not place them where their properties indicated they should go, he said the atomic weights had been predicted wrongly
- he left gaps where no atomic weights were know, predicting that the gaps would be filled in later
- he also noted that elements in the same group all had the same valency, the same affinity for other elements (measured by the number of hydrogen atoms they typically combined with); this tended to confirm that valency was related to chemical properties
- [valency/electrons: chemical properties; nuclear: physical properties of the element]
- Mendeleyev was the man who really first understood the layout of the periodic table and its significance
- chemistry came of age: alongside Newton's in physics and Darwin's in biology
- 1955: element 101 was named mendelevium
- now, on to physics
- Heinrich Hertz, b. 1857
- Hertzian waves = radio waves
- Guglielmo Marconi read the paper; rushed home to see whether Hertz's spark oscillator might be used for signaling
- Hertz left experimental physics for theoretical physics; died of bone disease at age 37
- quickly the rest of the chapter:
- a new form of energy: cathode rays; Rontgen; accidentally put his hand in between the cathode-ray tube and a screen (the rest is history); Becquerel (another accident) discovered "fluorescing" (naturally occurring radioactivity
- the discovery of radioactivity: Marie Curie; thorium, 150x more active than uranium; an "element" 330x more active than uranium (turned out to be two elements: polonium and radium)
- the discovery of the electron: Cavendish Laboratory; James Clerk Maxwell, d. 1879; laboratory only five years old; then Lord Rayleigh, short director-ship; then 28-y/o Joseph John (J. J.) Thomson -- like Mary Somerville before him, could use mathematics to bring order to physics; Thomson called them "corpuscles"; others called them "protyles"); today they are called electrons, a name first proposed by the Anglo-Irish physicist and astronomer George Johnstone Stoney; discovery quickly dwarfed by that of the quantum
- the discovery of the quantum: Max Planck, 1900, 42 years old, two years younger than JJ Thomson; University of Berlin; 1897: the year Thomson discovered electrons; Plank began work on the project that was to take his name; sketched an equation to explain the behavior of radiation in a black body -- electromagnetic radiation was not continuous, as classical physics had claimed, but could only be emitted in packets of a definite size
- the organization of the atom: Ernest Rutherford, March 7, 1911; notes taken by James Chadwick, a student at the time, in Manchester; alpha radiation; alpha particles (helium atoms); beta radiation; electrons with a negative charge [a third type of radiation, similar to X-rays, was discovered in 1900 by French physicist Paul Ulrich Villard; the most penetrating radiation of all, being stopped only by lead, called gamma radiation -- so, we had alpha, beta, gamma]
- the unification of JJ, Planck, and Rutherford: Niels Bohr -- "On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules," the collective title of Bohr's three papers on the subject ("The Trilogy," became a classic, and after three years in Manchester, offered a professorship in his home city of Copenhagen)
But the chapter that will probably interest me the most, Chapter 12: "A Biography of Earth: The Unified Chronology of Geology, Botany, Linguistics, and Archaeology."
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