Moseley

An early physics pioneer you rarely hear about is Henry Moseley, who died 100 years ago today. Moseley made an important discovery now called "Moseley's Law."

Up until Moseley's time, chemical elements in the iconic Periodic Table were arranged according to weight. There was other rhyme and reason to the arrangement of elements in the Table, but no true understanding of their masses beyond: things get heavier. There was hope that atomic mass would reveal something fundamental about physics, and the 1914 Nobel Prize went to Harvard's T. W. Richards for his careful and methodical measurements of atomic weights.

Moseley showed that by shining X-rays onto atomic samples, he got a distinct integer value for each element which he called Z. Others before Moseley -- namely Bunsen and Kirchoff -- had shown how unseen atoms could be "seen" and identified by burning them in flames, but Moseley's experiments were beautifully simple and related all elements together with their Z-values instead of getting a unique "fingerprint" for each. Moseley's law is still used to identify elements in deep space.

Exactly what Z was had only been postulated a few years earlier. Niels Bohr had shown that Z was the nuclear charge (1 for the hydrogen atom) and Ernest Rutherford had suggested that Z for heavy atoms might be about half an element's atomic weight. A Dutchman, Antonius van den Broek had suggested that Z was an element's "atomic number" and Moseley proved it.

Good ideas need good proof to be good science.

The Periodic Table was never the same after Moseley.

Henry Moseley probably should have gotten the 1915 or 1916 Nobel Prize in Physics, but he was killed by a Turkish bullet at Gallipoli at age 27.   

Henry Moseley (1887-1915)

Isaac Asimov wrote: "In view of what he [Moseley] might still have accomplished ... his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally."

The Nobel Prize In Physics Has Gravitas

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider" link

Now one of you geniuses please explain the Higgs Boson to us.

Chemistry is announced tomorrow. I'll get back to you. Carl Djerassi is someone I've long thought should get it but he probably never will.

Added: Lem links an animated lesson:



Lem Learning Gravitas

"Causal dynamical triangulations"

This video is part of a larger Nature article titled "Theoretical physics: The origins of space and time". Subtitled "Many researchers believe that physics will not be complete until it can explain not just the behavior of space and time, but where these entities come from."

Casual dynamical triangulation uses just two dimensions: one of space and one of time. The video shows two-dimensional universes generated by pieces of space assembling themselves according to quantum rules. Each colour represent a slice through the universe at particular time after the Big Bang, which is depicted as a tiny black ball.

 

Causal dynamical triangulations

bill stroud • 2013-08-29 12:10 AM said...     

Of course it would seem that language was never intended to provide such meaningful terms that identifies the actual state or state transitions. After all its the structure of language where precise (imprecise) terms create paradoxes. The truths exist in domains that language will never describe. When we can communicate at a level that language never can, we will begin to assemble these elusive truths. Language is a member of the Darwinian set of rational.