Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 114 Group Photo of Solvay Meeting 62

Walking out of the gate of the venue, Rutherford lit the tobacco in the pipe, took a deep breath and asked, "Chen, did you already think about how to do this verification experiment, but didn't say it at the meeting?"

Just as Chen Muwu could tell at a glance that Rutherford's smoking outside the arena was a drunkard's intention.

Rutherford, who had been with him for more than a year, also noticed that Chen Muwu seemed to be hiding something from the participants.

Today is the third day of this Solvay meeting. In the past few days, whenever Rutherford wanted to smoke, he would just smoke in his seat, regardless of the other people around him. An old man like Lorenz, and a lady like Madame Curie.

Because smoking is still a very common thing now, there is neither the concept of second-hand smoke, nor understand that smoking is a behavior that is very harmful to health.

But after he finished his speech, Rutherford got up suddenly, held a pipe and went straight to the door beside him. Chen Muwu knew that this obviously meant that he had something to say to him.

The teacher's vision is really sharp, and he saw through Chen Muwu's tricks at a glance.

So he no longer hid it, but stood upwind where he could not inhale second-hand smoke, and then directly told Rutherford the answer: "Director, that's right, I have really thought about it, how should I do this?" Experiments to verify the existence of spin on electrons.

"And this experiment has been successfully done, but I think that because everyone in the venue was thinking about the abnormal Zeeman effect, no one noticed this experiment.

"I want to repeat the experiment that Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach did the previous year to verify the quantization of space. It should be able to verify that electrons have spin."

In 1922, Stern and Gerlach conducted an experiment in which silver metal heated in a high-temperature furnace released silver atoms, and after passing a beam of silver atoms through a non-uniform magnetic field, they observed discrete magnetic moments , thus confirming the existence of space quantization.

For this, Stern also won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physics.

However, in the reason for the award to Stern, this experiment that directly led to the concept of electron spin was not mentioned at all.

This is because another participant in the experiment, Gerlach, had already become a swastika scientist, so not only he himself was not awarded the Nobel Prize, but also the experiment named after him was deprived by the Nobel Prize jury Eligibility to appear in the justification for the award.

There is also an anecdote about their discovery of discrete magnetic moments, that is, at first, Gerlach did not observe silver atoms on the condensation glass disk.

This is because silver, being a white metal, is not very visible on the screen glass.

But when Gerlach handed the glass dish to Stern, the silver atoms on it suddenly appeared.

Because of the sharp depreciation of the Deutsche Mark, Stern could not smoke high-quality cigars and could only smoke low-quality cigars containing sulfur.

After the sulfur in the smoke met the silver, it formed black silver sulfide, which made the experimental results appear.

It is also thanks to the poor that this experiment was successful. If De Broglie were to do this experiment, it would be difficult to get the correct experimental results.

Hearing him mention the Stern-Gerlach experiment, Rutherford immediately understood what Chen Muwu meant.

It's just that he didn't understand. Since this experiment had already been done, what was Chen Muwu doing hiding in his speech?
After listening to the teacher's question, Chen Muwu said with a smile: "Director, although the silver atom has only one outermost electron, it is still a bit unconvincing.

"So I plan to change the experimental material and replace the silver atoms with hydrogen atoms in the ground state, because the electrons in the hydrogen atoms in the ground state do not have orbital angular momentum, so if the same results as in the Stern-Gerlach experiment still appear , then it can be explained that there must be other magnetic moments in the electron, and the magnetic moment is the angular momentum, that is, the spin of the electron.

"I want to treat this experiment as my graduation thesis, what do you think this time?"

Ever since Rutherford rejected the idea of ​​using the incompatibility principle as his graduation thesis, Chen Muwu has been thinking about what to use instead.

Although he had already thought of two kinds before, he always felt that they were more or less inappropriate.

Then when he was writing the outline of electron spin in the past few days, he naturally thought of this experiment. If he made it and wrote it as a paper, it should be the most appropriate one at present.

Sure enough, after hearing Chen Muwu's thoughts, Rutherford's eyes lit up: "Okay, okay, let's do this experiment and write this paper! As soon as the Solvay meeting is over, we will return to the Cavendish Laboratory , I will ask Kapitsa to arrange for you immediately."

Kapitsa has been the assistant director of the Department of Magnetics for a year, and Chen Muwu is the right professional counterpart for this experiment that uses magnetic fields.

"Director," Chen Muwu recalled what Langevin said to him on the first day, "After the meeting, I would like to ask for a few days off to go to Germany on the way from Belgium to visit Professor Planck and Dr. Einstein." When my first paper was published, these two seniors also helped me a lot.”

Without even thinking about it, Rutherford rejected Chen Muwu's verbal request for leave: "No time! I want to meet them, and there will be more opportunities in the future, but if you don't do this experiment quickly, it is very likely that others will take it first.

"After all, many people have heard Ni's idea in the venue today. Although they may not have realized it for a while, after they go back, as long as one of them also thinks of your idea, and If you do the experiment first, then all your previous efforts will be in vain.”

What he said was very excited, probably because he thought of the time when his paper was published by the Curies and Becquerel more than 20 years ago.

Chen Muwu knew that Rutherford was not arbitrary, but patiently reasoned with himself.

From this point of view, the plan for this trip to Germany should be in vain.

I don't know when the next meeting will be with Planck and Einstein in Germany?
It can't be the next Solvay meeting in three years' time, right?
Following Rutherford back into the conference site, Chen Muwu, who returned to his seat, wrote a letter to Einstein, telling him that he wanted to visit Berlin, but had to rush back to Cavendish due to an emergency. Xu is doing experiments in the laboratory, so he can only wait for the next chance to meet again.

Chen Muwu planned to hand over this rare handwritten letter that was not written with a typewriter to Langevin, and asked him to forward it to Einstein on his behalf.

……

After reading out the paper at the meeting, Chen Muwu felt that he had completed all the scheduled tasks during his trip.

He simply skipped the full-day meeting on the fourth day, planning to take a quick tour of Brussels, the capital of Belgium.

After all, you can't come here for nothing, can you?
Of course, before it got dark that night, Chen Muwu rushed back to the building of the Solvay International Institute of Physical Chemistry.

Because a sumptuous dinner will be held here tonight, as a practice banquet held in advance for all physicists.

After all, this session will end tomorrow morning. If the practice banquet is held that night, it is estimated that many people have already embarked on the journey back.

When Chen Muwu arrived at the building, the banquet had already begun.

The Belgians are not as rigid as the Trinity College dinner, and everyone in the banquet hall is not for eating, but more for socializing and chatting with colleagues.

There was also a piano in the corner of the stage, and a girl was sitting on the piano stool, playing a beautiful melody for the banquet.

Teacher Rutherford's side is still very lively, many people chatting there.

Chen Muwu picked up some food casually, and walked over to Blackett and De Broglie.

After the photos are taken tomorrow, everyone will part ways. Blackett will go to Germany with Langevin's master and apprentice. De Broglie, who loves to join in the fun, will certainly not miss the opportunity to meet Einstein; while Chen Muwu still follows Rutherford Back to Cambridge.

Schrödinger also took this opportunity to chat with Chen Muwu while holding a wine glass.

Hearing the greeting in German-like English, Chen Muwu simply started talking to him in German.

Schrödinger cut to the chase and directly praised the correctness of Chen Muwu's electronic wave theory, and congratulated him on verifying this theory with experiments.

Xiao Chen just remembered that since Schrödinger saw de Broglie's paper, he wondered if matter could be a wave, so could he find a wave equation for this wave.

Moreover, when his wave equation was developed, the electron diffraction experiment had not yet been successful.

Now that I have come up with the theory of matter waves more than half a year earlier than the original time and space, will it also make the Schrödinger equation come out earlier?
This is really a loop. When I return to the Cavendish Laboratory and finish the experiment to verify the electron spin, it seems that I will continue to publish a paper on the wave equation.

How did Li Zongsheng sing that song?It's really "traveling all day long and never being free for a moment"!
After chatting with Schrödinger for a while, Chen Muwu finally held back and did not ask him abruptly whether he likes cats or not.

……

The next day, Chen Muwu took a late night's sleep and took time to walk outside the gate of the research institute at nine o'clock.

In front of the Institute, on a piece of lawn in Leopold Park, a row of chairs with backrests has been set up for the group photo.

At Chen Muwu's level, he didn't even dare to hope that he could sit on a chair.

He consciously found Blackett, who was also wandering in the last row, as he had taken pictures at the Cavendish Laboratory last fall. The two tallest people stood together again.

Standing in the center of the back row, Chen Muwu felt that he had the aura of seeing all the mountains and small things at a glance.

His eyes swept over like the bosses in the front row, and then he found something ridiculous.

"Smart heads don't grow hair." Although the sunlight at [-] o'clock in the morning is not very strong, the bald heads in front of me reflect the sunlight brilliantly.

The shutter of the camera placed on the bracket in the center of the opposite side clicked mechanically, and Chen Muwu's expression was frozen on the film, with a smile on his face.

After the group photo is taken, the photographer also provides a separate photo service, and he wants to earn a fortune by virtue of this business.

Because the price of taking a photo is not cheap, Chen Muwu only picked a few people he thought were older to take a photo together.

People like Langevin who lived until after World War II were not in his consideration at all.

Just when Chen Muwu felt that the photos were similar and was about to leave with Rutherford, the brown-haired girl who played the piano at the practice banquet yesterday bounced up to him and said a few words to him talk.

Chen Muwu only understood the first sentence of "Bonjour" and made sure that the girl spoke French, but he didn't understand a single sentence of the rest.

De Broglie, who happened to be standing next to him, translated to him with a smile on his face: "She said she wanted to take a picture with you."

The girl probably realized that Chen Muwu didn't understand, so she also pointed to the camera in front of the lawn.

(End of this chapter)