The Science Book

DIGM ...

200 W hile the 19th century had seen a fundamental change in the way scientists view life processes, the first half of the 20th ...

201 the probability of finding a particle in a particular place and state. His German colleague Werner Heisenberg showed that th ...

202 OUANTA ARE DISCRETE PACKETS OF ENERGY MAX PLANCK (1858–1947) I n December 1900, the German theoretical physicist Max Planck ...

203 See also: Ludwig Boltzmann 139 ■ Albert Einstein 214–21 ■ Erwin Schrödinger 226–33 air in between it and us is cold. Every o ...

204 explain the thermal radiation pattern of a black body by figuring out the entropy of the system. Entropy is a measure of dis ...

205 law of thermodynamics remained valid, Boltzmann’s reading gave it a probabilistic, rather than an absolute, truth. Thus, we ...

NOW I KNOW WHAT THE ATOM LOOKS LIKE ERNEST RUTHERFORD (1871–1937) ...

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208 ERNEST RUTHERFORD T he discovery at the turn of the 20th century that the basic constituent of matter—the atom—could be brok ...

A PARADIGM SHIFT 209 found an unexplained radiation. What were these new radiations and where were they coming from? Becquerel c ...

210 ERNEST RUTHERFORD The plum-pudding model Thomson’s discovery of the electron earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906. ...

211 The gold foil experiment In 1909, Rutherford set out to probe the structure of matter using alpha particles. The previous ye ...

212 ERNEST RUTHERFORD them in their orbits—they ought to be continually emitting electromagnetic radiation. Steadily losing ener ...

A PARADIGM SHIFT 213 more convincing was the way in which the theoretical energy levels of the shells neatly fit actual “spectra ...

GRAVITY IS A DISTORTION IN THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879 –1955) ...

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216 ALBERT EINSTEIN I n the year 1905, the German scientific journal Annalen der Physik published four papers by a single author ...

A PARADIGM SHIFT 217 principle behind the emission is fairly easily described in modern terms (energy supplied by the radiation ...

218 ALBERT EINSTEIN significantly depending on whether it was observed from one side of Earth’s orbit, as our planet moved away ...