Chapter 5: The Naked Atom

This chapter has a much lighter tone to it compared to the previous ones. You can tell by the number of jokes, anecdotes and general giddiness on the part of Leon Lederman’s commentary. This change in attitude must be because of the topic covered, as hinted by the chapters title, Lederman goes through how scientists discovered the various subatomic particles, with particular emphasis on the electron. Knowing the authors background in chemistry its no surprise that he likes this stuff so much. A good deal of this chapter was dedicated to explaining the development on Quantum Theory and how it pertains to various particles from the micro to the macro. In turns out that the story of what happens inside the atom (not a-tom) is quite complex, and caused a lot of heated debates between some of the scientific communities brightest stars.

Some of the interesting things in this chapter (other then the nitty gritty Quantum mechanical model of course) is the personal relationships and background on these very famous physicists. For instance, Ernest Rutherford was a burly, 6 foot 4 inches tall New Zealander who had a knack for using small delicate lab equipment, that’s why J.J. Thomson hired him to work at Cambridge for him. Rutherford was known to swear…a lot , and especially at experiments, but this method seemed to work because he had the experimental results to back it up. After some years there, Rutherford crossed the pond to McGill University where he made a name for himself not only for his work with radioactivity that won him the nobel prize but also for saying things that would get him in trouble, like “All science is either physics or stamp collecting”. By the time Rutherford conducted his famous gold foil experiment, where he has lab assistants he was head of the Cambridge Lab. When the alpha particles were shot at the gold foil, and some actually bounced back he was astounded and was quoted as saying “It was as if you shot a 15-inch artillery shell at a piece of tissue paper and it bounced back at you”. He used this evidence to support the idea of a dense, positive nucleus found in the center of atoms.

Usually when students in high school are taught about what a chemical atom looks like, the model teachers’ use is called the Bohr- Rutherford Model. This would make it seem that Neils Bohr and Rutherford were scientific peers who worked together and were friends. They most certainly were not. Neils Bohr was a young and inspired by Rutherford’s new model of the atom, but he was not satisfied with how electrons were represented so we went to work to disprove parts of Rutherford’s model and fit in his own ideas. You can imagine that a senior phycisit with a Nobel Prize no less didn’t take kindly to a young outspoken physicist who was barely a postdoc. Luckily Bohr was right. His idea was Quantum energy levels that electrons sit in surrounding Rutherfords Nucleus. When an electron gains energy, it can jump up to another energy level, and when it looses energy it call fall back down to its ground state. The amount of energy required was a certain amount, and only a certain number of electrons could fit in each energy level.

Of course other very important physicists refined this model, adding to Quantum Theory, like Heisenburg’s theory of matrix mechanics which used spectral lines to define the radii of the orbits.

Erwin Schrodinger is another colorful physicist. He is credited with having the largest burst of theoretical creativity for someone over the age of 30 (old for new ideas from physicists). He created an equation known as the wave function that gave the radii of Bohr’s energy levels without any fudging. He called it the theory of Wave Mechanics and it was a sensations. What is so unique about Schrodinger? He created this entire theory in a few weeks, while on vacation in the Swiss Alps with his mistress. He said he just needed some new inspiration. His equation is easy to use, and it gives the probability of finding an electron at a specific point. This ease of use and useful and accurate information made it incredibly popular. Schrödinger hated this interpretation (of it being a probability equation) and ended up regretting creating it.

Scientists like to be right, and like to prove their peers wrong. This can create some rivalry, and one that is very famous was between Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein. They spent a good chunk of their  carreers finding the flaws in each others ideas. Einstien would create a thought experiment (hypothetical situation) and Bohr would find a flaw, then Einstein would counter and so on and so forth. Most of their disagreements centered around weather or not Quantum Theory was complete.

All of the work, the equations and theories can be applied to the Big Bang, and are what researchers (like Leon Lederman at Fermi Lab) are using to find the God particle. At the end of this chapter, Lederman states that he would rather stick to his particle accelerator then get involved in the raging debate around Quantum Theory, but he is glad other scientists are sticking with it.