The Discoveries
Great Breakthroughs in 20th-Century Science, Including the Original Papers
Chapter 1
The QuantumIn his famous autobiography The Education of Henry Adams, published only a few years into the twentieth century, the historian Henry Adams shouted alarm that the sacred atom had been split. Since the ancient Greeks, the atom had been the smallest particle of matter, the irreducible and indestructible element, the metaphor for unity and permanence in all things. Then, in 1897, the British physicist J. J. Thomson found electrons, particles far lighter and presumably smaller than atoms. The next year, Marie Sklodovska (Madame Curie) and her husband Pierre Curie discovered that the atoms of a new element, called radium, continuously hurled out tiny pieces of themselves, losing weight in the process. Now, nothing was permanent — nature no more than human civilizations. The solid had become fragile. Unity had given way to complexity. The indivisible had been divided.
As Adams was summing up the nineteenth century, he was evidently unaware of another scientific bombshell that had just explode ...
read full excerpt from: The Discoveries ebook
