If charges were somehow involved in this cathode ray business, then you'd better believe they'd listen to those fields.Īnd listen they did. What made the glow? How were charges - which, at the time, were known to be linked to the concept of electricity but otherwise mysterious - connected to that glow? Thomson cracked the code by a) making the best dang vacuum tube that anyone ever had and b) shoving the whole apparatus inside superstrong electric and magnetic fields. This phenomenon raised questions for physicists. If you stick a couple electrodes inside a glass tube, suck all the air out of the tube, then crank up the voltage on the electrodes, you get an effervescent glow that appears to emanate from one of the electrodes, the cathode, to be exact. In the late 1800s, he become enraptured with ghostly beams of light known as cathode rays. Operating in parallel with Einstein was a wonderfully gifted experimentalist by the name of J.J. These "united states"Īnd just when people were getting comfortable with the size of these minuscule morsels of matter, thinking that these had to be the smallest things possible, someone came along to complicate it. In other words, Einstein gave us a way to weigh an atom. And by putting this connection on solid mathematical ground, he was able to provide a pathway for going from something you can see (how much the grain moves around in a given amount of time) to something you can't (the mass of the particles of the fluid). By treating the fluid as something composed of atoms, he was able to derive a formula for how much the innumerable collisions from the fluid particles would nudge that grain around. And after a few carefully executed experiments, Brown realized that this has nothing to do with air or fluid currents.īrownian motion was just one of those random unexplained facts of life, but Einstein saw in that a clue. If you drop a large grain inside a fluid, the object tends to wiggle and jump around completely on its own. He was interested, in particular, by the problem of Brownian motion, first described way back in 1827 by Robert Brown (hence the name). Just like all the other physics that he became a fan of, Einstein revolutionized them. This was pretty compelling, and Albert Einstein was a big fan of these kinds of physics.
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