1915-1950(wolfe.defoe)

== James Chadwick was born on October 20th, 1891 in England, a country he would represent during numerous collaborations of the world’s finest physicists. He most notably served as the British liaison to America during the Manhattan Project and was the leading voice for Britain to develop the atomic bomb. During World War I he was imprisoned in a German prisoner of war camp where he was underfed and poorly treated, but allowed to continue some of his research. Chadwick believed it was necessary for the Allied Forces during World War II to have an atomic bomb because they would be “naked” if his fellow physicist Werner Heisenberg succeeded in developing the technology first for the Germans. Chadwick died on July 24th, 1974. ==

== The discovery of the neutron is Chadwick’s greatest contribution to physics. He discovered it by proposing that the gamma radiation given off by an atom was actually the result of an unknown particle that had no charge and then testing this hypothesis. The neutron is essential to nuclear fission and opened the door for the creation of the atomic bomb. A neutron is much easier to use in fission than a helium atom because it has no charge, so it does not have to overcome the charge of the atom it is bombarding in order to reach the nucleus and split it into its components. Chadwick was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1935 for this discovery. ==

Werner Heisenberg was born December 5th, 1901 in Germany. Without his work, quantum theory and the sciences related to it would never have developed or been put to use to analyze the behaviors of the parts of the atom. What is quantum theory and what are the related sciences? Quantum theory is any theory that uses Planck’s radiation formula or deals with the uncertainty principle, which Heisenberg is most famous for. The uncertainty principle states that the more information is known about one trait of a physical body, the less is known about the others. Quantum mechanics is the study of the theory of atoms and other objects that work and exist according to quantum theory, while quantum physics is the science that uses quantum theory to analyze the behaviors of physical systems. Heisenberg served as the Chairman of the Commission for Atomic Physics and as the Chairman of the Nuclear Physics Working Group. He died on February 1, 1976.

Heisenberg is best known for his creation of the uncertainty principle. As touched upon in the previous paragraph, the uncertainty principle states that the more information is known about one trait of a physical body, the less is known about the others. In the case of the electron, for which this principle was created, as more is known about the momentum of the electron, less is known about the actual position of the electron. Scientists can predict the location of an electron at a given time with 99% certainty that they are right, but there is a 1% chance that it is not there. This led to the idea of the “electron cloud”, which describes all the possible locations of the electron. It is important to note that if scientists say they know the location of the electron, they cannot say with any certainty where it will be (they know much about where the electron is, but have no way of telling where it will be in any given stretch of time).

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Erwin Schrodinger was born on August 12th, 1887 in Austria-Hungary. He got off to an early start, as he spent many hours studying theoretical physics and theoretical mechanics in university. He is known as a pioneer in the science of quantum mechanics and is credited with establishing many of the elements that are essential to the science. After finishing his studies in chemistry, he dedicated a few years to studying Italian painting; after this, he decided to study botany for several years, producing multiple academic writings on the subject. He taught at a university in Berlin for years but left due to the increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere of the country. He would take back his statements under political pressure, then later recant his change of heart and personally apologized to Albert Einstein for claiming not to be offended by Nazi policies. Schrodinger died a fulfilled life on January 4th, 1961.

Schrodinger’s greatest contributions were in the world of quantum mechanics. The following items are all attributed to Schrodinger; Schrodinger’s Equation, Cat, Method, Functional, Picture, Schrodinger-Newton Equations, Field, and Logics. Each describes a key component or idea in quantum mechanics. When one reads this list and sees Schrodinger’s Cat, they no doubt scratch their head in confusion. What does a cat have to do with physics, unless one is describing how the cat rights itself when dropped upside down? (don’t lie, you’ve thought about it, or maybe even experimented with it just so you could drop a cat upside down. PETA is on its way). It’s actually a “thought experiment”, a paradox, where two situations could be occurring at the same time without any way for the person pondering the situation to have any bearing on it. The same is true of the electron, except what we cannot control is its position or momentum.

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Schrodinger's (lol)cat []

//Still confused by quantum theory? This documentary will hopefully answer some of your questions and blow your mind at the same time.// What The Bleep Do We Know!? Home