Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 329: Can 68 be changed to another type of particle?

Let’s not argue about who made greater contributions to mathematics, between Lópida and John I Bernoulli, because this debate will neither yield a definite result nor make sense.

Irena and Frederick were both Chen Muwu's future relatives, so it was not worth it to have a face-to-face discussion about right and wrong.

He cited this public case in the history of the development of mathematics to persuade Frederick, who was filled with emotion when he saw the particle accelerator, not to always think about monetizing knowledge and take into account the petty profits.

He, Chen Muwu, was true to his word, and his words must be fulfilled. If he said he would give a particle accelerator to Madame Curie, he would definitely give her a particle accelerator. It was just that the time was a little later, and the location had not yet been determined. , it’s not like I won’t give it away, so what’s there to worry about?
The topic of the three people stayed on the history of mathematics for a while, and Chen Muwu suddenly thought of another example that was similar but not entirely similar.

This time the protagonist is not the French, but the land under the feet of the three people, the United Kingdom.

When I was in elementary and middle school, I would occasionally choose some "Reader" and "Yilin" style articles when doing reading comprehension on Chinese language test papers.

It tells about a British biologist, John Macleod, who was very naughty when he was a child - this is normal, after all, it is the nature of a little boy.

But Macleod's mischief was a little more serious. He killed the principal of his school and raised a dog.

Westerners love dogs much more than Easterners. Whenever any natural or man-made disaster occurs, volunteers will rush to the rescue from all over the country. After days and nights of unremitting efforts, volunteers The rescuers finally rescued a dying kitten or puppy from the ruins or disaster scene, which shows the importance of pets in their hearts.

So Macleod killed the principal's dog, which was an unforgivable mistake for him.

But fortunately, the young McLeod met an enlightened and responsible principal.

The principal did not ask McLeod to compensate or accept corporal punishment because of this incident.

He only assigned two tasks to the naughty student, asking him to hand in two anatomical diagrams as soon as possible, namely a diagram of the dog's blood circulation and a diagram of the skeletal structure.

Generally speaking, when the story is told here, it will begin to sublimate, and then there will be a corresponding question in the reading comprehension question to ask students what they learned from this story.

The sublimation point in this story is that it was precisely because of the principal's tolerance and generosity that McLeod became interested in biology, and finally discovered and extracted insulin that can control blood sugar and treat diabetes, and obtained won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Well, happy ending, everything looks great, doesn't it?

The year when Macleod won the Nobel Prize, 1923, happened to be the first year that Chen Muwu came to the UK from Sihai, and he won the prize in the same year as the American Millikan, who was famous for his oil drop experiment.

After learning about the list of winners that year, Chen Muwu remembered this story he had seen on a primary school reading question. The name and the reason for the award completely matched.

But since Macleod won the award, his reputation has not been very good.

The source of these voices came from another winner who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with him, Frederick Banting.

Research on insulin has always been conducted at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Macleod's position at the time was professor of physiology at the University of Toronto, where he also served as director of the physiology laboratory and assistant dean of the medical school.

At the end of 1920, Banting, a young Canadian doctor, went to the University of Toronto to find Macleod and proposed the idea of ​​using pancreatic extracts whose functions had been destroyed to treat diabetes.

MacLeod was not enthusiastic about this idea at the time because he knew that other researchers had conducted experiments in this direction without success. The mainstream view at the time was that the nervous system played a major role in regulating blood sugar concentrations.

There is another reason, that is, Macleod learned through questioning that the guest who came to his door actually had almost no experience in physiology.

But in the end, Banting persuaded the director of the laboratory, and Macleod agreed to allow Banting to use the physiology laboratory of the University of Toronto during his vacation in Scotland, and also provided him with the animals needed for the experiment. In addition, a student named Charles Best was sent as an assistant.

By the time Macleod returned from vacation, Banting and Best had achieved certain results.

However, Macleod expressed doubts about their results and asked the two men to continue to conduct more experiments to obtain further conclusions.

Not only did Banting do a good job in the experiment, but he was also very eloquent. This time he persuaded MacLeod to pay him and Best the research funds and wages for the experiment.

Their two-person experimental team lived up to expectations. In more than two years, they not only produced correct experimental results, but also won the Nobel Prize.

However, all the experiments were done by Banting and Best, but when it came to the Nobel Prize, it was Banting and laboratory boss MacLeod who won the Nobel Prize.

Macleod, who was not nearly involved in the experimental work throughout the process, all he did was provide a laboratory and provide funding and wages for Banting and Best's physical work.

If the lighthouse research in 1912 and the silage research in 1945 were the most prestigious physics and chemistry prizes in the history of the Nobel Prize, then MacLeod in 1923 was the most prestigious winner in the history of the Nobel Prize. Regardless of discipline.

——Of course, the premise of this irrespective of disciplines is that most of the Peace Prize winners will be excluded.

McLeod's award reminded Chen Muwu of his previous painful experiences.

He felt that he and Banting had done the same thing. They were moving bricks in other people's laboratories, taking the salary offered by others, repeating thousands of experiments, and then signing the final published paper. Put someone else's name on it.

In comparison, Rutherford in the Cavendish Laboratory was better. He was absolutely selfless and never took credit for the results produced by his students and staff.

With the speed at which the Cavendish Laboratory produced the Nobel Prize, it would have been easy for Rutherford to win the Nobel Prize, but he did not choose to do so in the end.

As the first Nobel Prize winner in Canadian history - of course, someone like Rutherford, who was teaching at McGill University when he won the prize - Banting was very dissatisfied with MacLeod's peach picking behavior. He gave half of his winnings to Best and refused to attend any events with MacLeod since then.

However, Chen Muwu thought about it for a long time, and in the end he did not provide any further examples to the Curies.

Because in this story, as a villain, MacLeod only used his power to pay money and easily gained honor.

Doesn't this further confirm Frederick's pessimistic thought, "Knowledge is useless, money is everything"?
Chen Muwu was in a daze on the side, and Irena, who had just thought clearly that Lópida had contributed to the Bernoulli family, was also thinking about the problem.

She looked at the empty space inside and outside the laboratory where the particle accelerator was located, and suddenly thought, maybe it was because Chen Muwu knew that she and her husband were coming here to visit, so he notified the Cavendish Laboratory staff in advance and asked them not to leave today. Come here to experiment and create a better visiting atmosphere for two people?

The foreigner couldn't hide his words in his heart, so Irena said exactly what she had just thought. "Chen, you don't have to do this for the two of us. We are all experimenters, and we all know how much subsequent things may be delayed if the experiment is delayed for one day."

Chen Muwu was shocked after hearing this. He thought that his girlfriend's sister was really smart. She guessed part of it right, but not completely.

He did send a telegram to Chadwick, asking him to clear the particle accelerator laboratory in the next two days, but the reason was definitely not to allow the Curies and his wife to better visit, nor was it what he stated in the telegram. What maintenance equipment are you talking about?

No one could imagine why Chen Muwu would make such a request, except himself.

"Sorry, Irena, I didn't think that far ahead, and this was not what I asked for."

The acting director of the Cavendish Laboratory, who told lies with open eyes, did not blush but his heart did not beat.

"But as you can see, the current situation of the use of the particle accelerator at the University of Cambridge is like this. It is empty after the novelty has worn off. No one in the Cavendish Laboratory will use this thing."

The request made in the telegram sent by Chen Muwu to Chadwick was to create this effect.

If only the Curies could see with their own eyes that this machine, the birthplace of the particle accelerator, was already sitting idle and gathering dust six months after it was built.

When they return to France to see Madame Curie and truthfully report what they saw at the Cavendish Laboratory, the Radium Institute may conduct careful research on whether to immediately raise funds to purchase a particle accelerator. Considered.

What Chen Muwu meant was that he was not going to demonstrate to these two guests how the particle accelerator worked and how it bombarded them. He just wanted them to "just come here for a visit" and be done with it.

But the people around me were like two copies of One Hundred Thousand Whys, asking all kinds of questions about the big machine in front of me.

"But after spending so much money to build this machine, why do you say you don't need it and then don't use it?"

This time it was Frederick who asked the question.

"Because there is only one type of material that is bombarded, which is the nucleus of hydrogen atoms. We started bombarding lithium. At first, the targets were relatively light metals or non-metals, and some new discoveries were made.

"But the number of elements is limited. Even the iron element, which ranks more than 20 in the periodic table, has been used as a target. You know, iron..."

At this point, Chen Muwu's words stopped abruptly.

He originally wanted to say that iron is the most stable element in the periodic table, and nuclear fusion will stop when it reaches iron-56.

But this content was a bit too advanced, and Chen Muwu said it subconsciously. Although he reacted in time, he was still speechless.

"Chen, what happened to Tie?"

"Iron, although iron is easy to prepare, it is too heavy! The mass of an iron atom is 56 times that of a hydrogen atom. Even if the hydrogen atom is accelerated to a high-energy state and used to bombard the iron atom nucleus, it will not What substantive results will be produced?

"Furthermore, this kind of big thing is very expensive and has a limited service life. Frequently conducting such meaningless bombardment experiments will not only fail to get the desired results, but also waste money and electricity, making it futile."

Chen Muwu finally rounded off what he blurted out in excitement, causing Frederick and Irena to nod as well, as if they agreed with brother-in-law Chen's statement.

But Frederick still had a thinking expression. After a while, he raised a new question: "Chen, as you said, the mass of the hydrogen nucleus is too small, which is indeed an unfavorable factor for bombardment. .

"Then if the hydrogen nucleus is replaced by something else, can we redesign a new experiment?"

"What's that other thing, a deuteron?"

Chen Muwu inexplicably remembered the plan that his teacher Rutherford had been obsessed with, using hydrogen nuclei to bombard deuterons.

"Deuteron... of course it is possible, but will it be difficult to prepare it?"

The hero saw the same thing, he had deceived his teacher in the same way.

Frederic continued: “I mean, use alpha particles that are available and can be made in large quantities.

"When I was studying with Professor Langevin at the University of Paris, I read a paper published by you and Dr. Blackett a few years ago. In that experiment, you used alpha particles to bombard nitrogen atoms, completing the first experiment in human history. A nuclear transmutation.

"So, can this particle accelerator accelerate alpha particles, which are also positively charged? If we use alpha particles to bombard some light atomic nuclei, such as lithium, beryllium, etc., will there be some unexpected effects?"

Frederick's words sounded normal to Chen Muwu at first.

Especially when he said that he had read the paper he and Blackett published together, Dr. Chen was even a little proud.

But the further he listened, the more Chen Muwu felt something was wrong.

By the time Frederick finished asking his question, Dr. Chen was already sweating in his heart.

Can using high-energy alpha particles accelerated by a particle accelerator to bombard a beryllium target produce some unexpected effects?

Yes, very capable.

Regarding this experiment, the couple in front of them had done a lot of research in their previous lives, and named the electrically neutral particles emitted after bombardment hard gamma particles.

The true identity of this hard gamma particle is not a gamma particle, but...

neutron.

The neutron has haunted teacher Rutherford for many years.

(End of this chapter)