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The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics and Improbable Experiments Changed the World - Hardcover

Sheehy, Suzie

 
9780525658757: The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics and Improbable Experiments Changed the World
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525658750 ISBN 13: 9780525658757
Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A surprising, fascinating journey through the experiments that not only unlocked the nature of matter and shaped our understanding of the cosmos but also forever changed the way we live within it

"A book about the fundamental problems of physics written from a viewpoint I hadn’t come across before: that of the experimenter. A splendid idea, vividly carried out.” –Philip Pullman, best-selling author of His Dark Materials


Physics has always sought to deepen our understanding of the nature of matter and the world around us. But how do you conduct experiments with the fundamental building blocks of existence? How do you manipulate a particle a trillion times smaller than a grain of sand? How do you cause a proton to sail around a twenty-seven-kilometer-long loop 11,000 times per second? And, crucially, why is all this important?

In The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the experiments that changed the course of history. From the serendipitous discovery of X-rays in a German laboratory to the scientists trying to prove Einstein wrong (and inadvertently proving him right) to the race to split open the atom, these brilliant experiments led to some of the most significant breakthroughs in science and fundamentally changed our lives. They have helped us detect the flow of lava deep inside volcanoes, develop life-saving medical techniques like diagnostic imaging and radiation therapy, and create radio, TV, microwaves, smartphones—even the World Wide Web itself—among countless other advancements.

Along the way, Sheehy pulls back the curtain to reveal how physics is really done—not only by theorists with equation-filled blackboards but also by experimentalists with hand-blown glass, hot air balloons and cathedral-sized electronics. Celebrating human ingenuity, creativity and above all curiosity, The Matter of Everything is an inspiring story of discovery and a powerful reminder that progress is a function of our desire to know.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DR. SUZIE SHEEHY is a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time between research groups at the University of Oxford and University of Melbourne. She is currently focused on developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine. The Matter of Everything is her first book.

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1

Cathode Ray Tube: X-rays and the Electron

Our story begins in a laboratory in Würzburg, Germany, in 1895. It didn’t look much like the clean white spaces used by modern scientists; it had beautiful parquet floors and impressive high windows looking out over the park and vineyards opposite. The physicist Wilhelm Röntgen closed the shutters and turned to his work. On a long wooden table, he set up a glass tube the size of a small wine bottle, which had most of the air removed using a vacuum pump.1 Wires trailed off from metal electrodes, one in the end of the tube (the negative cathode) and one roughly halfway down the length (the positive anode). When high-­voltage electricity was applied, a glow appeared inside—the so-called “cathode rays” that gave the tube its name. So far, everything was as he expected. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a small screen on the other side of his lab glowing.

He walked over to inspect it. The phosphor-coated screen was giving off a green-coloured light. When he turned the cathode ray tube off, the light disappeared. When he turned the tube back on, the light returned. Perhaps it was just a trick of the eye, a reflection of the light from the glowing cathode ray tube? He covered the tube with some black cardboard but found that the light on the screen persisted. He’d never seen anything like it before, but thought it could be important.

From this moment on, physics would never be the same. Beginning with this first serendipitous observation, experiments using cathode ray tubes would lead the field of physics into entirely new territory and start to overturn ideas about the natural world that had been accepted for millennia. In time, the cathode ray tube would lead to technologies which changed the way people live, work and communicate. It all started here, with this glowing screen, and the curiosity of an individual.

Wilhelm Röntgen, like most scientists around the world at the end of the nineteenth century, agreed that the subject of physics was almost complete. The Universe was made of matter that consisted of “atoms?.” They’d figured out that there were different types of atoms, which corresponded to different chemical elements. From trees to metals, water to fur: all the complexity of the material world around them differed in terms of hardness, colour and texture because they were built of different atoms, which they viewed like tiny, spherical Lego pieces. If you had the right instructions, you could take a particular set of atoms and create anything you liked.

They also knew there were forces through which everything interacted. Gravity kept the stars in our galaxy, and our planet circling the Sun. Even the mysterious forces of electricity and magnetism had finally been brought together into just one force: electromagnetism. The Universe was predictable: if you had all the details of the inner workings and set things in motion, the movements of all matter could be predicted perfectly.

Now only the details were left to explore—details like how exactly the cathode ray tube worked, one of the few small things they couldn’t quite explain. There were theories of course, including the idea that the glow inside was related to ripples in the hypothetical aether, the medium through which light was thought to travel in much the same way as sound is transmitted by the air. Now, in his investigations of the details of the cathode ray tube, Röntgen seemed to have stumbled onto a complication. Not only was there something unexplained happening inside the tube, but he’d found a strange effect happening on the outside as well.

Röntgen had seemed ordinary as a child. The son of a cloth merchant, he loved exploring nature in the countryside and forests. The one thing he did show quite an aptitude for was making mechanical things and this early ability turned out to be useful to his experimental work later in life. As an adult, his dark hair stood up from his forehead “as if he were permanently electrified by his own enthusiasm.”

Röntgen was a shy man who gave lectures in an intolerably low voice, was strict with his students and was even slightly uncomfortable at the idea of having assistants in his lab. But he loved science, sometimes quoting the great engineer Werner von Siemens, who said, “The intellectual life gives us at times perhaps the purest and highest joy of which the human being is capable.”

Now he had found something that no one had seen before. When he saw the strange glowing screen, he assumed that he wasn’t looking at the same kind of “ray” which caused the cathode ray tube to glow, since that effect seemed contained inside the tube. Instead he’d found a new kind of invisible ray which seemed to be able to travel much further. He immediately dedicated himself to exploring more, channelling all his time and energy into the lab. When later asked what he thought at the time he said “I didn’t think, I investigated.” He had a number of similar tubes around his laboratory which he could now use with the phosphor screen, setting up each in a methodical and thorough way to figure out the nature of the new rays. He placed different materials between the tube and the screen, trying paper, wood and even hard rubber. The rays went through all of them, barely diminishing. When he pointed the rays through the thick wooden door to the adjoining lab, he found he could detect them on the other side. Only when he placed aluminium foil in front of the tube did the rays seem to have some difficulty getting through.

He spent seven intense weeks in his lab, occasionally being reminded to eat by his wife, Anna Bertha. Apart from those interactions, he was working almost entirely alone, and he remained silent about his research. He didn’t tell his assistants, let alone his international colleagues. He knew that if he didn’t announce his discovery first, hundreds of other scientists who had similar experiments sitting in their labs would beat him to it. The only report of him speaking about the work was to a good friend, to whom he simply said “I have discovered something interesting but I do not know whether or not my observations are correct.”

Next, he tried sticking his hand in the way of the rays and reported: “If the hand is held between the discharge tube and the screen, the darker shadow of the bones is seen within the slightly dark shadow-image of the hand itself . . .” This gave him an idea. He used the rays to make an image of Bertha’s hand on a photographic plate, which confirmed his understanding: the rays travelled easily through the skin and flesh but not so easily through bone or metal. The bones in her hand and her wedding ring showed up dark in contrast to the flesh that we normally see with the eye. The ability to block the new rays was related to the density of an object. According to legend, when Bertha saw the bones in her hand she exclaimed “I have seen my death!” and never set foot in her husband’s lab again.

Röntgen needed to give the new rays a name in his notebook. In science, we typically denote things which are unknown with a letter like “X,” and so Röntgen came up with possibly the best unintentional branding in the history of physics. He called his new discovery “X-rays.”

Once he was satisfied that he understood how X-rays behaved, Röntgen had a decision to make. Should he patent the idea, publish his findings, or do more work before he announced his discovery? There were many questions that he was still curious about, like how X-rays were related to light and matter, what they were made from...

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Verlag
Knopf Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525658750
ISBN 13 
9780525658757
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
313
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Verantwortliche Person
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