Atom
Piers Bizony
2017 Icon Books (First published in 2007)
ISBN 976-1-78578-205-3
206 pages. Soft Cover.
21 b/w photos and 4 b/w line drawings.
Purchasing Details.
Amazon
My Comments on This Book
Rutherford appears on various pages including 27-36, 59-60, 78-91, 104. Unfortunately, the errors involving Rutherford makes one
wonder about the accuracy of the work as a whole.
Errors Noted.
p 27 The University of New Zealand was the examining body for the then 3 constituent universities or colleges at Auckland,
Christchurch and Dunedin. Wellington is the capital. Rutherford attended Canterbury College in Christchurch where he graduated with
3 degrees, B.A., M.A. (with honours in both Mathematics and physics), B.Sc. (in Chemistry and Geology.)
p 28 Rutherford didn't start working on X-rays with JJ Thomson. Their discovering wasn't announced until Rutherford had been at the
Cavendish for 3 months. He first worked on two other projects of his own (dielectric properties and wireless signalling at very
high frequencies) before joining to assist Thomson's work on how a good electrical insulator (a gas) could become a good electrical
conductor (a gas discharge).
p 29 Alpha particles were called undeviable rays until Rutherford's careful experiments at McGill showed they could be.
p 29 Rutherford went to McGill because interviewers arrived at the Cavendish, the source of past professors, when Rutherford
knew that as a non-Cambridge graduate he couldn't receive a college fellowship at Cambridge for another two years.
p 29 At McGill Rutherford initially used Thorium compounds as his radioactive soures. This was a waste product of mantles needed
for gas lamps.
p 29 At McGill Rutherford was well on the way to understanding natural transmutation before he invited Soddy to join him
in the chemical side.
p 30 Rutherford first dated the age of minerals and the Earth by the amount of helium gas occluded in a mineral.
p 32 It was Rutherford and Royds, not Geiger, who demonstrated that alpha particles were ionized helium atoms.
p 33 Geiger did not invent the Rutherford-Geiger tube. (See my book p325-327.)
p 34 The story of Rutherford's alpha scattering experiment is garbled. Marsden did the work under Geiger's laboratory direction
and they published the results.
p 86 Rutherford had wanted an accelerator for years, but knew industry could only produce dc voltages a fraction of that of natural
alpha particles. Following Gamow's talk on particles tunnelling into a nucleus, Cockcroft calculated that under Gamow's
theory, the flux of incident particles would be far higher than available from available radioactive sources. Gamow deserves
much of the credit.
Contents
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List of Illustrations |
vii
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Foreword by Jim Al-Khalili |
ix
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Acknowledgements |
xiii
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Preface |
xv
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Part 1 |
Energy in Pieces |
1
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Part 2 |
The Empty Atom |
27
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Part 3 |
Not Even Wrong |
41
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Part 4 |
Playing with Marbles |
77
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Part 5 |
Blast Radius |
99
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Part 6 |
Renormalising the Infinities |
129
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Part 7 |
Three Quarks fo Muster Mark! |
157
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Activities |
109
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Part 8 |
Ylem |
167
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Part 9 |
New Frontiers |
179
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Further Reading |
195
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Index |
197
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Reviews
Not known at this stage.
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