Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat was the first particle ever discovered? And how was it discovered?
What does it mean to be first? Join Daniel and Jorge to learn about the first ever particle discovered.
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Hey, Hey, why do you think people are preoccupied with being first?
What do you mean?
You know, like first person on the moon, first person orun four minute mile.
Yeah, I see what you mean. There's kind of an obsession right with being first. But you know, I think last can be good too.
Who wants to be last?
You know, like the last cocaine in the box. There's always the tastiest. The last person to arrive at the party makes you the coolest.
Person, that's true. That's true. Last person to turn in their project but still be on time.
That's right. I am a big believer in optimal procrastination. Hi. I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm sitting in a closet in Aspen, Colorado.
I didn't know you were in the closet, Daniel.
I'm more literally in the closet than figuratively in the closet.
Only only in Aspen, Colorado. That is a wild, wild place.
It is a beautiful place. I'm here because I'm at the Aspen Center for Physics for a week where people come from all over the country to sort of sit around and think about big ideas and think about the future of physics and brainstorm new experiments and think about the history of physics.
Also, oh wow, pretty cool. Is that something that happens every year?
Yeah, every summer physicists come to Aspen and think big thoughts. Well, surrounded by rich people.
You're saying like that's an exclusive thing. You can't be rich and a physicist.
Well, it feels like an Aspen The is two kinds of people, the rich people and the physicists. But it's fun to be here and to think about, you know, all the physics that's been done in the last fifty years, the physics that will be done in the next fifty years, and also makes me think back about the origin of physics, you know, like where this all started.
Yeah, so welcome to our party. Our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
That's right, our podcast in which we think about all the big things, the hard things, the new things, the old things, and try to explain them to you in a way that we hope is educational, understandable, and maybe a little entertaining.
First things, the last things, the things that made it just in time not to be late, all the.
Things that's right. We should do a podcast on people who won the Nobel Prize and their discovery came in just in time before the threshold.
Well. I always say that, you know, when I see grad students really stressed out, I always tell them that, you know what, you even if you get a C, you still get a PhD.
That's true. It took me a while to understand that nobody in graduate school cares about grades. Like you get an AT as you got a B. Doesn't really matter anymore because just surviving is all that matters.
Yeah, but they do care about in signs about being first, right, like, that's a huge deal.
It is a huge deal, and first counts for a lot. Like if you are the first person to publish an idea in a paper, even if you're first by one day, which means the other folks were thinking about it at the same time as you were, they just didn't put their paper out, you get primary credit for it, so it matters a lot.
Yeah, you get the particle named after you, you get people making videos about you online.
Yeah, it's basically first, and then there's everybodybody else. And I'm saying that's the right way to do it, or that it's fair, or that it's healthy. It's a little bit insane, but it's sort of the way we do things. There's a system where we put articles on the Internet, and the order in which the articles appear on the Internet for that day's listings depends on how close your submission was to four pm Eastern time. So every day at three point fifty nine Eastern time, there's a bunch of physicists sitting around their computers trying to click their paper in just past the deadline.
It's like an Internet comments where the first person always says first first comment, it's just a bunch of Internet trolls.
That's right, internet trolls with PhDs. Yeah, that's basically describes our field. Yep.
But first of discovers is a big deal. But yeah, maybe an even bigger deal is to discover the first of something, right, like the first planet or the first moon or the first asteroid. Those are pretty big too, even maybe more important than getting the credit.
Yeah, it's sort of like a categorical discovery, right, you discover a whole new kind of thing. The first person to discover, you know, a new kind of like marsupials or something. Right, it's like, well, it's not only you'd found a new animal, you found a whole new category of animals. That's pretty cool. Yeah.
Yeah, it changes everyone's perspective about things, right, I mean, to be the first to discover a giraffe, I mean that probably blew people's mind.
Yeah, And that's the idea, is that the first person is one that really carries the most information. Right, if you're the first person to have this new idea of a new way of thinking about the universe, or the first person to find something out, that's the piece of information, Right, that's how humanity sort of learns about it. And that's why I think being first is prized. It's not just like Usain Bolt, you know, running over the finish line a tiny bit faster than the next guy or the next scal It's it's really about who's delivering the information, who is making that sort of intellectual leap forward.
Yeah, like who planned that flag on that new continent? Right? Like you're literally out there by yourself.
Except that it turns out as usually indigenous people that you've slaughtered along the way.
But that aside side, Let's not make the analogy between physicism and concy doors.
Let's not promote white based euros Central colonialism on this show. But yeah, I say, you're the first personal land of the moon, right then you are doing something no human being has ever done before. That really is an important moment.
And so today this might be the first in a series of episodes about first, and today we're going to be talking about the first particle. Who discovered the first particle? And what was the first particle discovered?
Yeah, and this is a fascinating story. Not only did he discover particles, he sort of invented the concept of particles, which is something we're sort of still struggling to figure out, like what is a particle. We've talked about on this podcast a few times, like what does that mean philosophically? What does it look like? What are we really talking about? We have more than just a mathematical model. We have like a complete understanding of what a particle is anyway, and so it's instructive to go back to sort of the first time anybody said, oh, look I found a particle, to understand what made them think it was a particle? What ideas did they have that justified this creation of a whole new concept.
Yeah, and it's a big deal because everything is made out of particles, right, It's what makes up the things in the universe. Everything's made out of a particle.
Well, yeah, everything, if you mean everything, the five percent of the universe that you know is made out of particles. Right.
I didn't tell you that I know what dark matter and dark energy, I parmde of I forgot.
To mention that mastered those concepts. It was more for our listeners. I know that you're aware of dark matter and dark energy, but you know it's dark energy. We don't know what it is. Dark matter might be made of particles, we don't know, but it might not. But yeah, the rest of all the stuff in the universe, stars and ice cream and hamsters and all that great stuff is all made of particles, right, Yeah, And so it's fascinating to think about it. And I think we should clarify here when we talk about particles, I'm thinking about it in the modern sense. We have like twelve matter particles. We've thought about five forced particles. We've thought about not in terms of like elements, which sort of an earlier development, which of the current particles that we think of is not divided into smaller bits, was discovered.
Right, And there was a time in our human history where we didn't know these things, right, Like, we didn't know that we were made out of particles, and we didn't know how many there were. We didn't know what they were, what they looked like. Big there were so and it's pretty recent, right.
Yeah, most of human history we really had no idea. I mean, Greeks suggested this concept of an atom that maybe matter was divided into tiny bits, but that was just one idea they had of like, you know, lots and lots of ideas. So the fact that that one happened to be right, I think people give them too much credit for. But the modern idea that matter was divided into these tiny little lego blocks, essentially, that what seemed to us to be smooth and indivisible and continuous was act actually just like made of super tiny little pixels. That's a pretty modern idea. The origin of it comes in the eighteen hundreds, you know, with chemistry. People started to think about, you know, reactions between different gases and stuff, and they noticed that these gases had reactions in these patterns, which suggested that there was like individual little units of the gases, which of course turned out to be atoms and molecules.
Right. I imagined that maybe not a lot of people out there know what was the first particle discovered? Right, I mean, you know, if I had to guess, I don't know what I would say. You know, protons, neutrons.
The particles I'm thinking of the twelve matter particles. We have six leptons, those electron muon tau, and then three neutrinos, and then six quarks right the up down strange charm bottom top. So of those particles, I was wondering did people know, you know, which was the first discovered? People have any idea? And so I walked around and I asked people what was the first particle discovered? And again, these these interviews you'll hear were not done at UC Irvine, but actually in the airport at Heathrow, and so you'll hear some international voices.
So think back if somebody ask you what was the first what do you think the first matter particle discovered?
Was?
What would you say to a random stranger at an airport in London.
Here's what people have to ask you physics questions before you call security. Think about what your answer would be.
Well, here's what those travelers had to say, iron, I don't.
Know, proton, oxygen, or probably the electron electrons.
I imagine, all right, a lot of good guesses there. So people said iron, some people said the proton, some people said oxygen.
Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people when I said particle, they thought elements, they thought atoms. And I'm not sure if that's because they weren't aware of the structure of matter sort of below the atomic level, or they just thought that still counts as a particle. But you know, in modern day particle physics, we don't think of oxygen as a particle. It's basically like a huge construction, you know, it's massive the particle scale.
Yeah, and we're so we're talking about the discovery of the things that atoms are made at We know that matter is made out of molecules, and molecules are made out of atoms, and atoms are made out of smaller things that we so far don't know that they can be split anymore.
Right, that's right. And we know that these particles that some of those particles make up atoms, right, up quarks down quarks, and electrons make up atoms. But there are other particles out there, right, There's lots of other particles. There's twelve of them. And so it could be that when you discover a particle, it's not a particle that exists in the atom, right, Or it could be a particle that helps them solve the puzzle of how the atom is put together.
Right.
So there's more particles out there than sort of exist in your ice.
Cream besides the chocolate chips, right, And the.
That is a fundamental unit of happiness, but not a fundamental unit of the universe. And which you can't slice chocolate chips up.
But so at some point we thought atoms were like the smallest things in the universe, right, But then we find out that there are there. They were actually made out of particles. And so one of those particles was the first one discovered, and so the question is which one was it?
That's right, So I thought it would be fun we'd walk you through the experiment from the point of view of the experimenter, Right, what were they doing, what were they trying to figure out? Why did they do it? What did they learn? And at the end, well we'll reveal what the first particle was that was discovered by this experiment.
A mystery, an ice cream mystery exactly.
Nobody dies in this mystery.
Well, they did die, but at the time they were not.
Due to this mystery. Nobody was killed by this particle.
All right, let's get in.
Actually that's not true. People are killed by this particle all the time.
All right, let's get into the story. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're trying to piece together the story of which was the first particle discovered ever, so the first time that we figured out that the atom is not the fundamental unit of the universe. So step us third, d Daniel, what year is it? What year are we in? And what was what were people thinking?
Cast your mind back thirteen or so decades to the late eighteen hundreds, and back then physicists were really just starting to make any progress in like understanding the thing around the stuff around us. Back then, physics was like, okay, we got this kind of thing. We got magnetism, we got you know, people get electrically zapped, we got gravity. We have just like a long list of things that we don't understand. And compared to modern physics, where we feel like most of the stuff around us we understand, you know, the macroscopic scale. Right. It's rare these days that you see something happen that you're like, whoa, that's just totally a mystery. Back then, there was a lot of stuff going on that people didn't understand, and so people were just sort of investigating it, playing with it. Right. They didn't understand what gamma rays were, X rays were, and all this stuff. Now we have a holistic understanding, But back then there were a lot of these mysteries. Wow, and one of them. One of them was cathode rays. This is something people had created and we're playing with but didn't really understand.
Wow. It's amazing to think have that mindset, right, Like there's so many weird things going on and you're just like, oh, well, I'll just go about my life anyways.
Yeah. And you know, also, there were many fewer people doing science back then, and so there's just a lot less progress being made. And I wonder what it's like sometimes to live in a universe where you know, their natural things happening for which we just do not have an explanation, like in your everyday life.
Yeah, Like you're walking around and it's like, oh, look at that cloud. I have no idea what the thing is made out of? Or yeah, exactly, it's blue, I could who knows somebody painting it blue?
Yeah right? Or why is lightning strike? Or what is lightning?
Right?
All this kind of stuff, or what is disease? Right? People had no idea how disease was transmitted. My wife tells me this story about how until fairly recently, doctors used to go from doing autopsies on cadavers to delivering babies without washing their hands because they just didn't understand right that what disease was. And so it's hard to it hard sometimes to put your mind in the mindset of what people were like back then. But back then people were playing with cathoide rays, and until recently cathode rays were pretty common. They're what used to make TV's work. It's a little beam of electrons used to sweep along the back of the screen and make the picture on the screen. These days, everybody has a flat screen. But you know those old deep TVs, the ones that are pretty thick, Yeah, yeah, those have a little beam of particles at them. Back then people were playing with them because they were pretty easy to make. All you need to do was make some like glass tube that was mostly that was a pretty good vacuum, and you'd put some material in it's some metal and you'd you'd heat it up and then put some electrical voltage across it, and you would get these crazy glowing rays that shot from one side of the tube to the other.
Oh whoa yeah.
And they were like it was like a sideshow. People were like go around like you know circuses, like oh, here, see the bearded lady. See the man who can make glowing rays in a tube, you know, and nobody understood it. But it was just this like weird thing.
And that's why it's called a cathode ray tube, like yeah, yeah, like those old monitors and TVs are, they're called CRTs because that's what it stands.
For, right exactly. And you know, cathode comes from the fact that you have a voltage across as you have an anode and a cathode, right, And you would get these weird rays and nobody understood like what is this ray? You couldn't like put your hand in there because it was inside the tube and like touch it. People were wondering, like is a ray a fundamental thing of the universe? Right? They didn't know, and.
It's like so like I can make this thing glow.
But you know, everything in the universe is a mystery, is indistinguishable from magic until physics basically takes it apart and understands it. And either I say, that's either ruining the magic or you know, revealing the mysteries.
That's right, physicists killing the magic since late eighteen.
Hundreds, physicists capturing the magic to make better TVs.
For you look at that physicist or thinking the magic and then publishing a long paper about it and hopes that they get the noble price about.
It and getting it in just on time.
Before they did. So we were in late eighteen hundreds, and you know, I imagine this all kinds of weird things going on, right, Like Tesla was around that time too, right, and just the.
People people were playing with electricity and with magnetism, and the people were just starting to understand how those two things were connected. But there was lots of there was like every day there was some physics experiments somebody did with the result that people didn't understand, you know, which almost never happens anymore. But back then there was just like tons of stuff that nobody understood it was a it was a field day for physics, okay.
So and so that this one in particular led to the first discovery of a particle. So step us through who is playing with this?
So it's a guy named J. J. Thompson, and he was curious about what these things were, and he was like, well, let's try to you know, poke them. Let's like see what we can do to effect these rays. So the first thing he did, if he's like, oh, right, I'm going to make my cathode ray and then I'm going to put the cathode ray tube inside another electric field. So remember there's already a little electric field inside. I have a cathode and an anode. You're playing a voltage across it. That's what makes the rays. But he put that inside another electric field to see if he could bend the rays. His question was like, can I move the direction of the rays by applying an electric field?
Because you know, like why not?
Right? Yeah, Like you know you have this is how you do science. You have a limited number of tools and you just try to poke everything you can with those tools and see if they give you any information.
Do you think That was the first thing he tried, Like did he try? Was he sitting around like what if I put a banana on the beam, or what if I you know, what if I light a fire? Or what if?
Question? And I bet? I bet his His log notebook contains a bunch of hilarious stuff. But this is what if I dip the caploid rays and chocolate. This is the first productive set of experiments he did. And and what he found was that if you put another electric field on it, you can bend the rays. So instead of just having straight rays across the tube, he could make the rays hit the side of the tube instead.
Whoa, Like he was bending the light rays. Like he was bending this magical glowing ray.
Yeah, and it like glows purple or whatever. And he was bending this ray And that must have been pretty cool, right, because you can turn up and down the electric field and you can see the ray bending, and so you're like, wow, I have power over this ray, you know.
And that's not something you can do with light, Like if you light a flashlight, that beam is not gonna get bent noticeably or at all by a magnet.
Right, that's right. A magnet or electric field will not change the direction of light. You can do it with a black hole, though, but I don't think you have one around in your workshop.
He didn't have a black hole in the eighteen.
He did not have a black hole, or I'm sure he would have tried it, right, dip the black hole and chocolate, combined the black hole with bananas. You never know.
These rays you could bend, which was weird, right.
And that told him that they probably had some electric charge to them, right.
That this wasn't just like neutral light. This was something with special property to it.
Because the only things that have electric charge, you're the positive or negative, get moved by electric by electric fields, right. Everything else just ignores electric fields. So I told him that these rays had some charge to them. So that was the first hint that they had like some quality. Rather than being glowing and cool, they carried a charge.
Meaning like they prefer or get repelled or attracted by like the opposite ends of a magnet.
Exactly, exactly, Okay.
So then this told JJ Thompson that there was something to this glow right, like it was. It wasn't just like empty light. There was something to it.
Yeah. And then to confirm that, he did another experiment, which is he swapped out the electric field for a magnetic field. And remember, any particle that feels charged will also get bent by a magnetic field that works a little bit differently, And so this sort of confirmed to him that it really was something that was charged because he could also bend them. We use the magnetic field. So he turns the magnetic field on and the rays bend.
And if you use a magnetic field, they also bend.
Yes, they also bend with a magnetic field. So bent to electric field and it bent to a magnetic field. So that really told him that there was something therewith charge. But the real genius of his experiment came in the next step, what do he do? Other people had tried this kind of stuff, but he was the first person to combine the electric field and the magnetic field at the same time. But the cool thing about this combining them was that an electric field bends it based on how much charge it has. Okay, the magnetic field bends it based on how much charge it has. And also it's more sensitive to the mass. So by measuring how much the electric field bends it versus how much the magnetic field bends it, you can measure the ratio of the charge and the mass of this ray this thing. Right, So he's shooting this particle through the Catherine ray, he's bending it one way with the electric field, another way with a magnetic field. He's measuring all that. That lets him know that the ray has mass, right, that the thing that's inside the ray that's causing this glow has some mass, And it lets him measure ratio of the electric charge to the mass.
Because like, if something is heavy and has a negative charge, it will bend one way. But if something is light and has a negative charge, it will bend differently.
Yeah, it won't bend as much if it's heavier for example. Okay, so the stronger the charge, the more the bending. The higher the mass, the less the bending. And because the electric field and the magnetic field are sensitive in different ways to these two quantities, he could measure this ratio by measuring both of those things. So this is like experimental cleverness. We hear lots of stories in the history of physics of like theoretical genius right moments of insight, but experimental cleverness, you know, has really paved the way. This is like people figuring out how can I solve this puzzle. How can I make the universe tell me this answer? How can I arrange things in a way that nature cannot escape? Right, So I like the story.
Can I outclever the universe?
Yes, exactly. It's like being a detective, right, It's like, how can I prove you know, how can I rule out this alibi? How can I construct a situation where the suspect has to reveal to me who is the real killer? Right? That's experimental cleverness. And the answer he got blew his mind because he measured this charged mass ratio and he was enormous, right, the charge which much much, much, much much bigger than the mass.
So he saw that whatever this ray was, it was supercharged basically like had a huge amount of charge but very little mass.
Yes, exactly, And so he was like, wow, whatever this thing is, there's stuff to it. It has mass, but it also has charge. But it's got this like way more charge than it has mass.
But that must have been a little kind of mind blowing, right, like this ray has mass, like it has substance to it.
That was the moment when particle physics as a concept as a field was born, because he was like Aha, now I can say if this ray is made of something that has stuff to it, right, And he that's when he took this first step. He created the concept of a fundamental particle. And he's like, there's something in there that has both charge and mass. So it's like a dot in space that has more than one property, right, And that's sort of the idea of a particle. It's like, it's just a point in space that we could put labels on.
But how do you know it wasn't just another atom, or that it was just another like fluid or something.
Well, we knew it wasn't an atom because the well, atoms are either neutral or they have positive charge with he didn't know the structure of matter right at this point, he didn't know what atoms were made out of. Right, But no atom had this charge to mass ratio. Right, Atoms were much more massive compared to their charge. So this was definitely something This is definitely something new because remember atoms are dominated by protons and neutrons, which are much much heavier than electrons.
Oh okay, and that was a big deal. Do you think that really kind of blew his mind? Did he write like eureka on his notebook.
Yeah, I think that was a great moment. You know, and other people had tried and failed, mostly because they didn't have a good enough vacuum in their cathloid ray tubes and so they didn't achieve these results. And so, you know, he worked carefully, he had some good ideas, and so he was the first one across the line. So because he was the first one across the line, of course he got the right to name this thing. Right. He created this whole concept of a particle. And I think it was a mind blowing moment for him because he thought pretty grandly about it. But I don't think he'd be very impressed with the name he gave this.
Say, all right, well, before we reveal the name of this first particle, let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the first particle ever discovered, and we've been talking about the story of JJ Thompson who did some clever experiments and he found that these rays of glowy stuff had a lot of charge, but not a lot of mass. And so I'm trying to figure out, Daniel, how this you go from that to like, oh, it must be little tiny particles.
That's basically it, right, He said, that is what a particle is. It's a point in space that has some mass and has some charge. And that's like he knew this was something new. It hadn't been discovered before, and so he thought, like, I'm going to call all this thing something. It must be something because it has some mass to it. You know, these days of modern particle physics. Right, we don't have to have mass to have a particle. Sort of generalize the concept of a particle to just be like a dot in space that has labels, and those labels can be like, do you have electric charge yes or no? Do you have quantum color charge? Yes or no? Do you feel the weak charge? Yes or no? Do you have mass? Yes or no? Right, do you have spin us? Various answers to that, And so we've sort of generalized this concept of a particle to be like a dot in space with various labels. But to my understanding, this is the first moment in history when that idea was used.
Like, here's a thing, it's an it, and it has a special property of mass and a special property of charge. That are you know, sort of like labels on it.
Yeah, and remember he's imagining these rays to be made up of these things and they're all identical, right, they all have the same charge to mass ratio. So it's like this, he's imagining it to be this stream of little special dots.
And so that was the birth of particle physics.
Yeah. Yeah, although he didn't call it a particle, his talents were in experiments and in cleverness, but not necessarily in you know, naming things.
He and I would not have been friends.
No, he called this thing that he found the corpuscule. Oh, and I think corp comes from like you know, in corporation, not like a company.
But like like a corpse, you know, like matter, like like a body.
Yes, like a body exactly. And so I think he was going for like, you know, corpsito with corpuscule, like a little body, you know, or something.
He had been Italian, the history of physical would have been totally.
Different, that's right, exactly, or Spanish or something. So he called it a corpuscule.
So he saw this weird glow and he thought, and he figured out that it has mass in charge, and so he imagined that it must be little tiny things.
Exactly, and he call them corpus gules. And he was pretty pleased with himself. I mean, it's a pretty big discovery. And he named this thing and then he imagined, ah, well, maybe I haven't just discovered what makes these raise up. Maybe everything is made of these things. And you know, there's this tendency in physics when you make a discovery to generalize it, to think too expansively to imagine that maybe you've cracked like a really deep secret in the universe. And so he imagined that, you know, maybe atoms were made out of these things, and he had found the basic building block of the whole universe.
He kind of wasn't that far off, right, Like, in a way, everything is sort of that we know about his sort of made out of these corpus schools, corpus corpus cuity.
Yes, that's right. He was right that the little corpusculitos were boiling off the cathode, right, and so it was reasonable for him to imagine that maybe everything had these little corpus gules inside of them. Of course, there's a deeper question there, right, like, because these things were negative and most matter is neutral, so you had to answer the question of, like, you know, what's balancing it out. So he imagined that his model of matter was, you know, basically a bunch of his little corpuscules and then some like thin positively charged jelly that filled the universe to balance out those the negative charges from his little.
Corpuscuit corpus cule and jelly.
He was thinking about dessert, clearly.
Well, let's not keep our listeners in suspends anymore, Daniels. So this Corpus School was later renamed into what we all know and love as the Electron.
Most of the time in particle physics, whoever discovers the particle, we give them the right to name it, and even if it's ridiculous or silly, we usually keep it. But this one, for reasons I don't understand, was later renamed and his the inventor the discoverer's choice of corpus School was tossed aside.
Oh man, there was like a vote.
I don't know. I have to dig into the history of that a little bit. But you got skills, but these aren't them.
We love you, But that's a dumb name.
Man, it is a dumb name. I mean, I'm so I'm glad to be a particle physicist and not a corpuscule physicist.
I don't know. I mean, is electron really a better name than corpus School? I mean it sounds kind of corpuscule.
It sounds like a disease or something. I'm sorry, sir, you have corpus gules. I'm gonna prescribe chocolate covered bananas for the rest of your life.
I'm sorry, sir. Every atom in your body has a bunch of corpus skools, and that is true.
You're infected with corpuscules. There's nothing we can do about it. I'm sorry to be so negative. Ha ha ha.
So that was the first particle then that was ever discovered by humans. It was the electron, that's right.
Yeah, And he was right that electrons or corpus gules as he said them as he called them, are inside all matter. Right. He was wrong about the structure of the atom and and where the positive charges are, but he was right that that corpus schools play a role in matter. And that's pretty cool.
Wait wait, I'm not made out of some positive jelly.
I'm positive that you're not made out of jelly. And you know, to round it out, what we now have a pretty solid modern understanding of what happens inside cathode ray tubes, right, and why they why they work, and you know, very quickly they have the You have the cathode on one side and you heat it up and the electrons boil off. Then they get slurped across by by the electric field to the other side. But the interesting little nugget there is that if you have a perfect vacuum, you won't see any cathoid rays. Right, electrons are not really visible, they don't glow. The reason that JJ Thompson saw rays is because he didn't succeed in making a perfect vacuum. He still had some gas in there, and that gas was getting ionized by the electrons and it was glowing. So the cathode rays he was saying, were it actually electrons. There were glowing gas caused by the electrons, Like.
The electrons hit the gas and then that's what makes it glow.
Yeah, exactly. So if he had been a better experimental list and achieved a better vacuum, he never would have discovered the corpus cool.
If he had been the first to create a vacuum, he would not have discovered the electron.
That's right, exactly. So it takes a combination of luck, skill, cleverness, and ineptitude.
All right, So that's the first particle ever discovered, the electron, And I have to say, I think that's the one I would have guessed, probably the electron.
Yeah, because electricity is sort of immediate and tactile. Yeah, is that why you.
Would have thought electrons accessible, and I just associated with the eighteen hundreds a lot. You know, they knew about lightning and Tesla's coils and things like that.
Do you have like a steampunk image of physics.
In eighteen hundreds? Basically everything I know is to comics basically.
You know, well that's probably pretty accurate, so I won't dispute it.
And so what do you think would have happened if we had stayed with Corpus coool? Like would this be my elect corporate tronic watch that I'm wearing and I'm listening to Corpus chronica?
I don't know, And I can't even imagine, Like if we had stuck with that as a sort of precedent, what would we have named the other particles? You know, we have to follow the corpse, the corpse ethos or the the cule pattern the cules.
So that's pretty cool to think about how things are discovered, you know, like to imagine not knowing anything about the things around you and to be the one who comes up with some crazy idea or some some crazy experiment that cracks it all open.
As always the case, when you look at the history of science, it seems pretty straightforward. Like he didn't have to have any special materials. The kind of stuff he had around, lots of people had around. He just combined it in a sort of unusual way. And it's easy to look back and think, oh, I would have done that, but remember back then there were a lot of things people didn't understand. And having these ideas and recognizing the significance of the results you have, that's really where the genius comes in, and knowing which experiments to do and what they mean. And so we should give a lot of credits to JJ Thompson. We made a little bit of fun of him, but he really kicked off this whole field of part of physics, and so I certainly owe him.
A lot, right, And there's still a huge number of things we don't know. So any one of our listeners out there could be the one, could be the next JJ Thompson, could be the next person to discover something amazing.
Yeah, and maybe with the materials you have in your garage.
Just maybe give it a little more thought before you name it just there.
Yeah, you do discover a new particle, please call Orgey his very reasonable consulting rates.
I work for bananas, so very reasonable.
All right, all right, thanks for tuning in.
You hope you enjoyed that. See you next time.
If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, zunes, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
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