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Articles: My Thoughts | In quest of Infinity-06
- Prof. venkata ramanamurty mallajosyula
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Feeling utterly frustrated, Boltmann later committed suicide by jumping into the Adriatic Sea off Trieste, a coastal town in Italy. Ironically, just a couple of years or so later, Einstein, in a monumental paper, gave a powerful justification for the atomic theory of matter by explaining a baffling phenomenon called Brownian motion.
This theory was soon verified and thereafter the atomic theory of matter gained rapid currency amongst physicists. Incidentally, Trieste is where the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam later established an internationally famous centre for Theoretical Physics; that story comes a bit later.
Physicist Ludwig Boltzmann
OK, we are now down to the level of atoms, whose dimension is typically 10-8 cm or one hundredth of one millionth of a centimetre – that is small, is it not? Well, wait and soon you would encounter distances that are still smaller. Once physicists [and of course chemists who came first!] accepted the atomic theory of matter, it was universally realised that though matter might appear continues to us in our daily experience, it is pretty grainy when one comes down to the level of atoms. As far as time scales are concerned, time intervals like 10-12 seconds [i.e., one millionth of one millionth of a second!] are what one usually deals with.
Atoms write their signatures through what are called spectral lines. The word spectral lines need not stump you. When energy is pumped into an atom [there are many ways of doing this], it becomes excited. This excitation energy is subsequently got rid off by the atom and it does this usually be emitting light at specific wavelengths. Spectral lines are just signatures of the light emitted by an atom while de-exciting. Study of atomic spectra is thus of vital importance in many branches of modern activity, ranging from basic physics and chemistry all the way to forensic science.
Until 1900, people imagined atoms were like hard billiard balls, but when J.J. Thomson of Cambridge discovered around that time that he could chip an atom and squeeze electrons out of them, people realised that atoms had their own internal structure. It seemed as if atoms were made up of electrons that were negatively charged and that positive charge was tucked in somewhere within the atom. Around 1910 or so, Niels Bohr of Denmark tried to imagine a model for atomic structure and develop a theory for spectral lines emitted by atoms when they emit radiation.
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