Reborn and become a Great Scientist

Chapter 419

Before the "Journal of Prince's College" sent from Stockholm had not yet been delivered to the hands of physicists at universities and research institutes in various countries around the world through the International Postal Union, the latest issue of "Nature" 》weekly arrived first.

This issue of "Nature", if you just look at the cover, is no different from every other issue.

But as long as you open the cover and look at the catalog of this issue, you will find that there is a small but very shocking advertisement in a prominent position of the catalog.

"The neutron has finally been discovered. Details can be found in the first issue of "Journal of Prince's College" published soon.

"——Rutherford"

Chen Muwu has placed many advertisements for "Journal of Prince's College" in various academic journals and major newspapers in various countries.

But this time it appeared in the journal "Nature". The text message of just one or two lines was more eye-catching than any advertisement published by Chen Muwu before.

What’s attractive is not that Rutherford, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, also helped advertise for the Journal of Prince’s College, but because of Rutherford’s first sentence——

"The neutron has finally been discovered."

Not only Rutherford had been looking for particles like neutrons for more than ten years, but physicists and chemists all over the world wanted to know whether this magical thing existed or not.

If neutrons are really discovered in the world, many theories will be explained at once.

For example, why is the charge number of an element n, but its relative atomic mass is far greater than the mass of n protons combined together.

Another example is why the same element, which contains the same number of protons and nuclear charges, can produce many isotopes with different masses.

Now Rutherford suddenly said in Nature magazine that neutrons had been discovered.

Everyone wanted to take a look at how the neutron was discovered for the first time, but this advertisement informed that the paper that discovered the neutron was not published in this issue of "Nature" magazine, but was published in Chen Muwu's study in Stockholm. On the "Journal of Prince's College" that was founded.

For a time, telegrams sent to Stockholm Prince's College from universities and research institutes around the world came in like snow flakes.

There was only one thing in these telegrams, which was to place an order with the "Journal of Prince's College" for the latest first issue of the "Journal of Prince's College".

As a result, not even two days after these telegrams were taken, they had already begun to receive documents and packages from Stockholm one after another.

And what these packages contained was the first issue of the "Journal of Prince's College" that they were eager to see.

Looking at the postmark date stamped on the package, everyone knew that Chen Muwu had already mailed these first issues before the subscription telegram was photographed.

Now that the journal has been received, all everyone wants to do is open the catalog, find the page number of the Neutron paper, and read it carefully.

Unexpectedly, the catalog of "Journal of Prince's College" gave people another big surprise.

Looking at the papers written in the catalog, regardless of the content of the papers, just looking at the titles of these papers, each one is jaw-dropping.

Apart from not knowing what a cyclotron is, the remaining papers dropped several blockbuster bombs in the chemistry and physics circles.

If the contents of these papers are all true and correct, then any paper can be placed in a professional academic journal as the finale paper.

And there are so many final papers like this in this first issue of "Journal of Prince's College" that you can't even count them on one hand.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, has Dr. Chen opened his eyes?

How could he write so many heavyweight papers in one go?

Yes, there is another surprising thing about the journal catalog, which is that the name Chen Muwu basically appears in the author column of these papers.

——Except for two articles analyzing and examining the chemical properties of iodine-like and manganese-like elements, they were all signed by Bierman.

Is it because Chen Muwu knew that the "Journal of Prince's College" he founded might not be popular and no one would submit articles to him, so he did everything himself and cobbled together an academic journal?

Planck, who was far away in Berlin, regretted it endlessly.

If he had known that Chen Muwu had so many good things in his hands, he would have communicated frequently with Chen Muwu and asked him to submit all his papers to the "Annals of Physics".

When physicists and chemists around the world received the "Journal of Prince's College", the first thing they did after opening the catalog of the first issue was to carefully read the "Discovery of the Neutron" paper located in the middle of the journal.

The paper written by Chen Muwu is very simple, and the experimental design mentioned in it is not complicated.

Basically, laboratories that study radioactive physics will have natural radioactive sources that can produce alpha particles.

For a comprehensive university, it is very simple and easy to find a boron crystal from the Department of Chemistry, Geology or Minerals.

Can neutrons be found using just these two items that can be found everywhere in universities?

So what have they done in the past ten years or so and wasted all their time?

Some people firmly believe in the experimental phenomena mentioned by Chen Muwu in his paper, while others express doubts about it.

Many universities and research institutes that have the conditions to conduct experiments immediately began to test the so-called neutron proposed by Chen Muwu based on the experiments designed in the paper after reading this paper.

Because Chen Muwu's experiment was indeed easy to replicate, repeated experiments conducted by these institutions quickly produced results.

Using alpha particles produced in natural radioactive sources to bombard a target made of boron crystals can indeed produce an unknown particle beam with extremely high energy and no charge.

Using this newly generated particle beam to bombard paraffin crystals rich in hydrogen atoms can easily bombard protons out of them.

If according to the test method further given by Chen Muwu in the paper, this unknown particle beam is used to collide with the hydrogen nuclei, helium nuclei and deuterium nuclei in the hydrogen, helium and deuterium gases that have been filled in the cloud chamber. , the mass of this unknown particle can be easily measured through calculation.

Although the data measured by everyone may be different from the data revised by Chen Muwu in the paper due to accuracy issues.

Ignoring the errors in these decimal places, no one among the physicists who reproduced Chen Muwu's experiment can deny the fact that the mass of the unknown particle they measured is not far from the mass of the proton. .

Sir Rutherford of Cambridge University had long predicted an electrically neutral particle with the same mass as the proton but without any electricity. Now this new particle, which Chen Muwu calls "neutron", appears in front of everyone very easily.

Physicists who have produced experimental results have published their measured data in well-known and authoritative academic journals in their own country, Europe, and the world. Some even published copies of their papers in accordance with the "Journal of Prince's College" A copy of the address published in the first issue was also sent to the editorial office in Stockholm.

For a time, a large number of related papers were published, all supporting Chen Muwu's discovery of neutrons.

After completing the above experiments, some experimental physicists followed the method of Zhao Zhongyao and Cockcroft and began to bombard deuterium nuclei with gamma rays in order to accurately measure the mass of neutrons.

As the parties involved in the experiment, Zhao Zhongyao and Cockcroft, who had returned to the Cavendish Laboratory, were invited by Professor Aston.

The latter is well-known in academia for accurately measuring the masses of hundreds of isotopes, for which he won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Now that the neutron has been discovered, Professor Aston will certainly not miss this opportunity again. He thinks that he must measure the precise mass of the neutron as soon as possible, and then reprint his physics textbook. The "Isotope" book regarded as a standard by scientists and chemists.

Aston invited the two of them to his laboratory. In addition to being interested in neutrons, he was also interested in another thing.

Because he saw the "Journal of Prince's College" that Rutherford and his team brought back from Stockholm. In addition to the paper on the discovery of neutrons, Aston also focused on another article about the new isotope of carbon - carbon. 14 articles.

Issues related to isotopes have always been a focus of Aston's research.

He thought that while accurately measuring the mass of the neutron, he could also measure the precise mass of carbon-14.

The Cavendish Laboratory is very busy, but the first issue of the "Journal of Prince's College" has made a much bigger splash around the world than here at the University of Cambridge.

In Germany, in addition to Planck who had the shamelessness to invite Chen Muwu to write more manuscripts, Pauli, a professor of physics at the University of Berlin who took over Planck's class, also regretted it.

He was probably the saddest man in all of Europe after the first issue of the Journal of Prince's College came out.

While still in Stockholm, Bohr had already sent a telegram to his beloved disciple, telling him that Chen Muwu had discovered neutrons and positrons at Prince's College.

Pauli, who received the telegram at that time, didn't take it seriously at all, thinking that Chen Muwu was just using a cover-up trick on his own territory to deceive Bohr who was visiting there.

Even though he received the "Journal of Prince's College" sent to the school from Sweden, Pauli still didn't care much about it.

Chen Muwu himself is the author of the paper, and he is also the editor-in-chief of this academic journal.

In this case, let alone the publication of a paper on the discovery of the positron in the "Acta Sinica", Pauli could still accept it even if some more absurd conclusions were published in it.

The contestant is Chen Muwu himself, and the referee of the competition is still himself.

How can there be any fairness in this kind of competition?

And this kind of academic journal should have little value.

It wasn't until those experimental physicist colleagues at the University of Berlin actually followed the method provided by Chen Muwu in the laboratory and discovered the neutrons bombarded from the boron crystal by alpha particles that Pauli began to panic.

The experimental physicists at the University of Berlin followed his method and detected positrons in the experimental product of this experiment that had a deflection direction completely opposite to that of electrons in the electromagnetic field. Pauli began to completely regret his mistake.

Why could I not think about it at that time and insist on agreeing to Chen Muwu to increase the bet from ten pounds of gold coins to eight thousand pounds?

If nothing else, Chen Muwu, who discovered the neutron and the positron, should be able to win his Nobel Prize in Physics again.

At the same time, he received a bonus of 8,000 pounds from the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.

But where should he find 8,000 pounds to pay for the lost bet between him and Chen Muwu?

No matter whether he pays the bet or not in the end, Chen Muwu will definitely publicize the matter, and in the end his face and reputation will be ruined.

Pauli then thought again, this Chen Muwu must have known about the existence of positrons for a long time.

He just kept this matter in his hands and did not announce it to the public.

Only after coaxing himself into making a bet with him did Chen Muwu bring up the matter of positrons, embarrassing himself and losing points.

The human heart is so sinister!

Pauli felt that he could never admit defeat so easily. He must launch an absolute counterattack.

So he picked up the first issue of "Journal of Prince's College" and began to study the papers on it by himself.

I want to see if all these papers are accurate, and if I can pick out possible problems in them, which will make you, Chen Muwu, embarrassed!

With the support of coffee and tobacco, Pauli, a professor of physics at the University of Berlin, plunged into his laboratory and stayed there for several days.

During these days, he kept writing and drawing on the draft paper with a pen. There were many calculation processes and many traces of smearing and modification on it.

Finally, Pauli, who was mentally exhausted and had thick dark circles under his eyes, drew two heavy horizontal lines with a pen under a phrase on the draft paper.

What is written on the horizontal line is "the spin of the neutron".

Also in Berlin, there was someone other than Pauli who wanted to find out the flaws and deficiencies in the content of Chen Muwu's papers in the first issue of "Journal of Prince's College".

This man did not make a very lucrative bet with Chen Muwu like Pauli did.

However, he opposed the theory put forward by Chen Muwu for longer than Pauli.

Over the years, he has been looking for possible flaws in Chen Muwu's theory, and then dealt a fatal blow to Chen Muwu.

The newly published neutrons and positrons by Chen Muwu certainly attracted his attention this time.

(End of this chapter)