Memo To The Kennedy Clan: Head To NYC Central Park; Take The Grandchildren And Their Sleds; It's Spring; We Haven't Seen This In 130 Years -- March 22, 2018

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).

******************************

The Market

On another note, TSLA crashes through the $310 floor. Late last week the CNBC "Fast Money" folks heartily recommended TSLA. Whatever.

*************************

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)

Then on to Chapter 4: the unification of space and time, and of mass and energy.

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."