Imagine, you happened to fall back in time to November, 1705 and imagine you happened to be admitted to the lecture hall of the Royal Academy in London, then you could have seen an incredible sight. Isaac Newton’s 45-year-old assistant named Francis Hauksbee (who was an expert in vacuum pumps) demonstrating a strange device, with …
How The Light Bulb Was Invented And Who Invented It? Read More »
Imagine, you happened to fall back in time to November, 1705 and imagine you happened to be admitted to the lecture hall of the Royal Academy in London, then you could have seen an incredible sight: Isaac Newton’s 45-year-old assistant named Francis Hauksbee (who was an expert in vacuum pumps)demonstrating a strange device, with a …
How did Norman Lockyer go from being a poor civil servant with no scientific background, to a famous astronomer who co-discovered and named the Chromosphere of the sun, determine that lines in the chromosphere were from a new element, named that new element Helium (after the Greek God of the sun Helios), and create and …
How Norman Lockyer Discovered Helium, Chromosphere And Nature Magazine Read More »
When we think of astronomy, we think of this: a person studying the position of the stars with a telescope, but in the mid-1800s until the mid-1900s most astronomy was more like this: studying the image of the different frequencies of stars from a photograph made with a telescope and a diffraction grating or prism. …
Joseph Fraunhofer: The Father of Modern Astronomy Read More »
In this video I am going to talk about the three major types of nuclear radiation: alpha, beta and gamma, distinguished by how powerful they are, alpha being easier to block then beta which is easier to block than gamma. There are quite a few videos about what these radiations are but almost nothing on …
In July of 1898, Marie Sklodoska Curie and her husband Pierre Curie published the discovery of a new substance they called Polonium by declaring that they had found “Une nouvelle substance radio-active” (yeah, I got bad grades in French class, why do you ask) which is translated as“a new radio-active substance[i]”. This is actually the …
So, why is this thing called a battery and what does it have to do with a military battery which is a group of missiles or cannons? From shocking jars to Volta and beyond. Table of Contents Franklin’s Battery of Leyden Jars Laura and Giuseppe’s Study Volta’s Invention: “The Galvanic Battery” References Franklin’s Battery of …
Niel Bohr said that before 1913 no one expected that the lines of color you get from burning hydrogen would tell you anything about physics even though the colors follow a pattern. Just like butterflies have patterns with the colors on their wings, “but nobody thought that one could get the basis of biology from …
Niel Bohr’s Nuclear Model: The Nuclear Model That Changed Physics Read More »
In June of 1939, 37-year-old Werner Heisenberg went on a tour of America for a cosmic-ray symposium, and everywhere he went everyone wanted to know why, why, why was he staying in Germany? Heisenberg was no obvious anti-Semite, in fact, he had lost most of his friends, mentors and students to Hitler’s anti-Semitism and had …
Was Max Planck a fundamentally decent man who actually confronted Hitler and tried his best to thwart the damage inflicted by the fascist regime, especially towards Jewish scientists? Yes! Was Planck also complicit in the Nazi regime of terror by capitulating to Hitler’s demands and convincing others of the futility of protest? Yes! How can …
