"""It was as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a sheet of tissue paper and it came back to hit you."" Who is the 20th century scientist who is describing his most famous experiment in the above words?"
"Merit Trophy') bears his name. In 1909, as a 20-year-old student at the University of Manchester, he met and began work under Ernest Rutherford. While still an undergraduate he conducted the famous Geiger–Marsden experiment, called the gold foil experiment, together with Hans Geiger under Rutherford's supervision. This experiment led to Rutherford's new theory for the structure of the atom, with a centralised concentration of mass and positive charge surrounded by empty space and a sea of orbiting negatively charged electrons. Rutherford later described this as ""almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue"
"lengthy court battle between Nobel, Maxim, and another inventor over alleged British patent infringement. A variety of fillings have been used in shells throughout history. An incendiary shell was invented by Valturio in 1460. The carcass shell was first used by the French under Louis XIV in 1672. Initially in the shape of an oblong in an iron frame (with poor ballistic properties) it evolved into a spherical shell. Their use continued well into the 19th century. A modern version of the incendiary shell was developed in 1857 by the British and was known as ""Martin's shell"" after its inventor."
"experiment was performed by scientist Stanley Miller under the guidance of Harold Urey in the early 1950s. In the Miller–Urey experiment, water was boiled in a flask with the gases hydrogen, ammonia, and methane. The gases flowed through the apparatus past two electrodes that produced an electrical charge that acted as the lightning that would have been in the atmosphere before life on Earth. When the gases condensed after being cooled down, they fell back into the boiling flask. What Stanley Miller found in the flask when he observed the water were acids and amino acids. Amino acids are the"
"mechanism which, for the first time, allowed shells to be fired safely in high-powered flat-trajectory guns. The effect of explosive shells lodging into wooden hulls and then detonating was potentially devastating. This was first demonstrated by Henri-Joseph Paixhans in trials against the two-decker ""Pacificateur"" in 1824, in which he successfully broke up the ship. Two prototype Paixhans guns had been cast in 1823 and 1824 for this test. Paixhans reported the results in ""Experiences faites sur une arme nouvelle"". The shells were equipped with a fuse which ignited automatically when the gun was fired. The shell would then lodge itself"
"with physicist Enrico Fermi, who was well known for emphasizing ways that complex scientific equations could be approximated within an order of magnitude using simple calculations. He went on to develop a series of sample calculations, which are called ""Fermi Questions"" or ""Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations"" and used to solve Fermi problems. Fermi was known for getting quick and accurate answers to problems that would stump other people. The most famous instance came during the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. As the blast wave reached him, Fermi dropped bits of paper. By measuring the distance they"
"this case. In 2006 an experiment was carried out for Channel Five television by Andrea Sella of University College, London, the results of which helped to revive the ""explosion"" theory. Sella built a model of the hold, with paper cartons representing the barrels. Using butane gas, he created an explosion that caused a considerable blast and ball of flame—but contrary to expectation, no fire damage within the replica hold. ""What we created was a pressure-wave type of explosion. There was a spectacular wave of flame but, behind it, was relatively cool air. No soot was left behind and there was"
"mysteries of Nature, and I have done) two balls of lead, the one ten times bigger and heavier than the other, and let them drop together from 30 feet high, and it will show, that the lightest ball is not ten times longer under way than the heaviest, but they fall together at the same time on the ground. (...) This proves that Aristotle is wrong.' Astronaut David Scott performed a version of the experiment on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, dropping a feather and a hammer from his hands. Because of the negligible lunar atmosphere,"
"Fermi on its list of the top 100 persons of the twentieth century. Fermi was widely regarded as an unusual case of a 20th-century physicist who excelled both theoretically and experimentally. The historian of physics, C. P. Snow, wrote that ""if Fermi had been born a few years earlier, one could well imagine him discovering Rutherford's atomic nucleus, and then developing Bohr's theory of the hydrogen atom. If this sounds like hyperbole, anything about Fermi is likely to sound like hyperbole"". Fermi was known as an inspiring teacher, and was noted for his attention to detail, simplicity, and careful preparation"
"hands of various inventors over the next century, including Abraham Stagholt in the 1770s and George Manby in the early 19th century. William Congreve, who invented some of the first rockets for British Army use, designed a rocket-propelled whaling harpoon in the 1820s. The shell was designed to explode on contact and impale the whale with the harpoon. The weapon was in turn attached by a line to the boat, and the hope was that the explosion would generate enough gas within the whale to keep it afloat for retrieval. Expeditions were sent out to try this new technology; many"
"attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the fourth century BC, and an early speculation was that it was caused by the collision of clouds. Subsequently, numerous other theories were proposed. By the mid-19th century, the accepted theory was that lightning produced a vacuum. In the 20th century a consensus evolved that thunder must begin with a shock wave in the air due to the sudden thermal expansion of the plasma in the lightning channel. The temperature inside the lightning channel, measured by spectral analysis, varies during its 50 μs existence, rising sharply from an initial temperature of about 20,000"
"engagement. At this time, the predominant ammunition used against tanks was the armor-piercing kinetic energy shell that defeated armor by direct pressure, spiking or punching through it. During the late 1930s shaped charge ammunition was experimented with that used chemical energy for armor penetration. The shaped charge concept is officially known as the ""Munroe Effect"" and was discovered by accident decades earlier by Professor Charles E. Munroe at the U.S. Torpedo Station, Providence, RI. Professor Munroe was detonating different manufactured blocks of explosives on a sheet of armor plating and observed the blocks having the manufacturing letters recessed (vs. raised)"
"flame in a tube with both ends open. Physicist Pieter Rijke introduced this phenomenon into a greater scale by using a heated wire screen to induce strong oscillations in a tube (the Rijke tube). Feldman mentioned in his related review that a convective air current through the pipe is the main inducer of this phenomenon. The oscillations are strongest when the screen is at one fourth of the tube length. Research performed by Sondhauss in 1850 is known to be the first to approximate the modern concept of thermoacoustic oscillation. Sondhauss experimentally investigated the oscillations related to glass blowers. Sondhauss"
"distance of one-half inch from the hair."" In August 1896 Dr. HD. Hawks, a graduate of Columbia College, suffered severe hand and chest burns from an x-ray demonstration. It was reported in ""Electrical Review"" and led to many other reports of problems associated with x-rays being sent in to the publication. Many experimenters including Elihu Thomson at Edison's lab, William J. Morton, and Nikola Tesla also reported burns. Elihu Thomson deliberately exposed a finger to an x-ray tube over a period of time and suffered pain, swelling, and blistering. Other effects were sometimes blamed for the damage including ultraviolet rays"
"in Thomas Browne's ""Pseudodoxia Epidemica"" of 1646. Further work was conducted in the 17th and early 18th centuries by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay. Later in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky. A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature."
"tongue-tied and incapable, sometimes turning his back on the audience and mumbling to the diagrams on the wall. In the laboratory he felt himself at home, and ever after confined his duties mostly to demonstration. He achieved renown by a great experiment made in 1834 – the measurement of the velocity of electricity in a wire. He cut the wire at the middle, to form a gap which a spark might leap across, and connected its ends to the poles of a Leyden jar filled with electricity. Three sparks were thus produced, one at each end of the wire, and"
"against warships in 1822 in his ""Nouvelle force maritime et artillerie"". Paixhans developed a delaying mechanism that for the first time allowed shells to be fired safely in high-powered flat-trajectory guns. The effect of explosive shells lodging into wooden hulls, and then detonating, was potentially devastating. Henri-Joseph Paixhans first demonstrated this in trials against the two-decker ""Pacificateur"" in 1824, in which he successfully broke up the ship. Two prototype Paixhans guns had been founded in 1823 and 1824 for this test. Paixhans reported the results in ""Experiences faites sur une arme nouvelle"". The shells were equipped with a fuse that"
"an interview. He began to try to mix different formulations of heat-resistant, non-toxic plastics, which he casually referred to as ""Gubbins."" He was highly productive in this, mixing up to 20 formulations a day. Eventually, he produced a formulation that seemed promising, and used the Extruder he had bought years before to make it into sheets. He tested it with a blowtorch, and it dissipated the heat perfectly. This is the material that became known as Starlite. This invention gained much publicity in the 1990s, after he was featured on the British television series ""Tomorrow's World"", holding a blowtorch directly"
"pleasant people, foremost of whom is Mr. Thunder & Lightning Harris, whom I daresay you have heard of."" In his diary he noted that on the evening of 21 November he attended a ""popular lecture from Mr Harris on his lightning conductors"" at the Athenaeum. Harris used an ""Electric machine"" for a thunder cloud and a tub of water for the sea, then with ""a toy for a line of battle ship he showed the whole process of it being struck by lightning & most satisfactorily proved how completely his plan protects the vessel from any bad consequences. This plan"
"phosphorus in his mouth, then spit it out into a handkerchief. The heat from his breath and rubbing his hands together would ignite the phosphorus, which burns in air at about . Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell has written that Underwood may have used a ""chemical-combustion technique, and still other means. Whatever the exact method—and the phosphorus trick might be the most likely—the possibilities of deception far outweigh any occult powers hinted at by Charles Fort or others."" A century later, the tale of Mr. Underwood was brought to the public eye again as the subject of a 1974 song by"
"as happened in the Tunguska event, the 1930 Curuçá River event, and the Chelyabinsk meteor event. Air burst artillery has a long history. The shrapnel shell was invented by Henry Shrapnel of the British Army in about 1780 to increase the effectiveness of canister shot. It was widely used by the time of the War of 1812 and stayed in use until it was superseded during the First World War. Modern shells, though sometimes called ""shrapnel shells"", actually produce fragments and splinters, not shrapnel. Air bursts were used in the First World War to shower enemy positions and men with"
"of Franklin's historic kite experiment, the identity of the electricity developed by rubbing and by electrostatic machines (frictional electricity) with lightning had not been generally established. Dr. Wall, Abbot Nollet, Hauksbee, Stephen Gray and John Henry Winkler had indeed suggested the resemblance between the phenomena of ""electricity"" and ""lightning"", Gray having intimated that they only differed in degree. It was doubtless Franklin, however, who first proposed tests to determine the sameness of the phenomena. In a letter to Peter Comlinson of London, on 19 October 1752, Franklin, referring to his kite experiment, wrote, On 10 May 1742 Thomas-François Dalibard, at"
"and showed that hydrogen sulfide gas was the culprit. John Scott Haldane John Scott Haldane (; 2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936) was a Scottish physiologist famous for intrepid self-experimentation which led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases. He also experimented on his son, the equally famous J. B. S. Haldane (both for extending his father's interest in diving and as a key figure in population genetics and the development of the modern synthesis), even when he was quite young. Haldane locked himself in sealed chambers breathing potentially lethal cocktails of gases"
"Rupert Hall; the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. What holds for discoveries, also goes for inventions. Examples are the blast furnace (invented independently in China, Europe and Africa), the crossbow (invented independently in China, Greece, Africa, northern Canada, and the Baltic countries), and magnetism (discovered independently in Greece, China, and India). Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to only a few historic instances involving giants of scientific research. Merton believed"
"chemistry', he endowed chemical principles with the drama and verve of a sound-and-light show, which now and then burned his suits beyond repair. His hands flew above test tubes and Bunsen burners. Amid explosions and swishing clouds of carbon dioxide he explained the mysteries of chemistry with contagious enthusiasm”. According to ""Time Magazine"", he “lectured with an animated, dynamic style that drew enthusiastic audiences of all ages”. “Grimacing with fiendish delight”, Life Magazine reported at the time, “he sets off explosions, shoots water pistols and sprays his audience with carbon dioxide in the course of 32 harrowing experiments dramatizing complicated"
"Physics and an admirer of Cavendish's work. Henry Cavendish Henry Cavendish FRS (; 10 October 1731 – 24 February 1810) was an English natural philosopher, scientist, and an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. Cavendish is noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called ""inflammable air"". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper ""On Factitious Airs"". Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and gave the element its name. A notoriously shy man (it has been postulated that he had what is now called childhood autism in the ICD-10),"
"from its hinges. An English journal reported that during an 1809 storm, three ""balls of fire"" appeared and ""attacked"" the British ship ""HMS Warren Hastings"". The crew watched one ball descend, killing a man on deck and setting the main mast on fire. A crewman went out to retrieve the fallen body and was struck by a second ball, which knocked him back and left him with mild burns. A third man was killed by contact with the third ball. Crew members reported a persistent, sickening sulphur smell afterward. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, in his 1864 US edition of ""A Guide"
"by Julian Schwinger. Ashkin, he said, was the first to break with this pattern: ""They somehow or other couldn’t do it. They had to go through this [the Schwinger method] to believe it. But that's all right. The only person who didn't, the first paper where it was used directly — which I kept looking for, I kept flipping through the Physical Review as it came out — was Ashkin. He'd done some calculation for some experiment, and he said, 'We’ve calculated this using Feynman's rules.' Bloop! There it was in writing! Then gradually more and more people did it."""
"almost perpendicularly, and not above forty or fifty yards from the main chains when it went off with an explosion, as great as if a hundred cannons had been discharged at the same time, leaving behind it a strong sulphurous smell. By this explosion the main top-mast was shattered into pieces and the main mast went down to the keel. Five men were knocked down and one of them very bruised. Just before the explosion, the ball seemed to be the size of a large mill-stone. A 1753 report depicts ball lightning as having been lethal when professor Georg Richmann"
"stating that it was extremely dangerous and impossible to handle. In fact, he was so frightened by what he created that he kept it a secret for over a year. Another of Pelouze's students was the young Alfred Nobel, who returned to the Nobel family's defunct armaments factory and began experimenting with the material around 1860; it did, indeed prove to be very difficult to discover how to handle it safely. In the 1860s Nobel received several patents around the world for mixtures, devices and manufacturing methods based on the explosive power of nitroglycerine, eventually leading to the invention of"
"Rope trick effect Rope trick is the term given by physicist John Malik to the curious lines and spikes which emanate from the fireball of certain nuclear explosions just after detonation. The adjacent photograph shows two unusual phenomena: bright spikes projecting from the bottom of the fireball, and the peculiar mottling of the expanding fireball surface. The surface of the fireball, with a temperature over 20,000 kelvins, emits huge amounts of visible light radiation, more than 100 times the intensity at the Sun's surface. Anything solid in the area absorbs the light and rapidly heats. The ""rope tricks"" that protrude"
"a test device could transmit information by heating a plate of metal to incandescence, an event that could be recorded by instruments located at the far end of a long, very straight pipe. The picture below shows the Shrimp device, detonated on March 1, 1954 at Bikini, as the Castle Bravo test. Its 15-megaton explosion was the largest ever by the United States. The silhouette of a man is shown for scale. The device is supported from below, at the ends. The pipes going into the shot cab ceiling, which appear to be supports, are actually diagnostic light pipes. The"
"In his letter of 14 June 1680 to The Royal Society, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek described an experiment he carried out by filling two identical glass tubes about halfway with crushed pepper powder, to which some clean rain water was added. Van Leeuwenhoek sealed one of the glass tubes by using a flame and left the other glass tube open. Several days later, he discovered in the open glass tube ‘a great many very little animalcules, of divers sort having its own particular motion.’ Not expecting to see any life in the sealed glass tube, Van Leeuwenhoek saw to his surprise"
"1919. Tudor was a professional and forward-looking artilleryman: historian Paddy Griffith has described him as an ""expert tactician."" He was a fighting general who spent a lot of time in the front lines: he was almost killed at the Third Battle of Ypres in October 1917, when a shell fragment hit him in the head and smashed his helmet. He was the first British general to use smoke shells to create screens, and one of the first advocates of predicted artillery fire. He suggested an attack in the Cambrai sector in July 1917, and his artillery ideas helped lay the"