Compton's long-simmering resentment finally found an outlet.
After returning to the laboratory at the University of Chicago, he immediately wrote a letter and sent it to Harvard University. The letter was full of all kinds of dirty words and cursed Professor Duane.
Compton then wrote to the American Physical Society at Columbia University, requesting the editorial board of Physical Review that he withdraw the paper he submitted at the end of December last year.
After he reorganized the paper, he asked someone to help translate it into German, and then sent it to the "Annals of Physics" in Berlin.
…
Across the ocean in North America, Compton of the University of Chicago is not the only one who has received this issue of the Annals of Physics.
As Compton's nemesis, Professor Duane of Harvard University also received this journal.
But because he was immersed in the laboratory at this time and wanted to find out the absurdity of Compton's paper as soon as possible, he had not yet had time to open the magazine and see what new discoveries his physics colleagues around the world had made.
It wasn't until two days later that he received a letter from Compton from Chicago. The words in the letter were filthy. At the beginning, he cursed himself in the face, calling himself a thundering cauldron, a corpse sitting on a plain meal, Ignorant and unskilled people.
Duane was confused and thought, what the hell is going on with Compton?
At the end of the letter, Duane saw that Compton asked him to read an article in the latest issue of "Annals of Physics" to see if he was smarter than Planck and Einstein. Also be correct.
In fact, Duane is not an idiot. He did not allow Compton's paper to be published, not because he did not support the light quantum hypothesis quoted in the paper. On the contrary, he was one of the first physicists in the United States to support the light quantum hypothesis.
After Millikan used precise experiments to confirm the correctness of Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect using light quanta, Duane followed closely and personally guided two of his doctoral students in 1921 to re-measure and calculate using the X-ray method. Planck's constant.
They published the accurate result of Planck's constant h=(6.556±0.009)×10^-27erg·s[1] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This result has been used by the physics community for a long time. For sixteen years.
So when Duane saw Compton's letter saying that there was a paper that was favored by Planck, the father of quantum, and Einstein, the proposer of the light quantum hypothesis, he immediately asked his secretary to find the latest issue of "Physics". Yearbook".
Although this guy also doesn't speak German, he can still guess the general content of the paper through symbols, formulas and schematic diagrams, which are common languages in the physics world.
He also recognized that the person signing under the title should be a Chinese.
Duane found Ye Qisun, who was writing his doctoral thesis under the guidance of Percy Bridgman, and asked the same question as Compton: "Dr. Ye, do you know that there is such a physicist named Chen Muwu in your country?" Scientist? As soon as you read the name Muwu (move), you will know that he seems to be a person destined to study physics."
Ye Qisun is one of the two doctoral students who helped Duan determine Planck's constant. He was a government-funded student studying in the United States under the Gengzi Study Group in 1918. After writing his graduation thesis this year, he will return to China.
Having been abroad for many years, he naturally did not know that Chen Muwu was a rising star in the domestic physics community, so he shook his head honestly and said: "I'm sorry, Professor Du An, I haven't received any information from the country for a long time." News, I didn’t know there was such a gentleman.”
Duan nodded, as if talking to him, but also as if he was talking to himself: "Could it be that I was really wrong this time?"
Ye Qisun was born in Tsinghua Academy. When this school was established, it was a preparatory school for studying in the United States. In order to send students to study in the United States, English was naturally the only foreign language.
He didn't know how to comfort his big boss, and he couldn't translate German papers for him like Wu Youxun. After standing there awkwardly for a while, he could only quietly exit Duan's office.
…
Originally, at the end of the nineteenth century, Europe was the center of physics experiments.
But as the United States becomes richer and richer, they are more eager to have more say in science.
So the Americans invested a lot of money and built laboratories with advanced equipment and observatories with large-diameter telescopes. The results and observations they produced were more accurate than their poor cousins in Europe.
From Maxwell's use of an octagonal prism to measure the speed of light and his use of an interferometer to conclude that the speed of light is constant, to Millikan's oil drop experiment and precise photoelectric effect, to Duane's precise measurement of Planck's constant, and what Compton did Scattering experiments, the experimental center of physics moved step by step from Europe to the American continent.
As a result, a large number of physicists appeared in Europe who had no money and a lot of free time.
As Rutherford said, "Just because I don't have money, I have to think hard." They devoted all their abundant energy into theoretical research, which led to wave after wave of climaxes in theoretical physics. In Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, it reached its peak in the early 1930s.
Although American universities are rich and powerful, their foundations are ultimately insufficient, so they have always adhered to the idea of "foreign monks can chant scriptures" and spent a lot of money to invite well-known European physicists to give lectures throughout the United States.
Famous people who have been invited include Lorenz, Planck, Einstein last year, and Arnold Sommerfeld this year.
As the dean of the School of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich, Sommerfeld has never won a Nobel Prize, but he is the physicist who has been nominated for the most physics prizes (81 times) in the world and has taught the most physics Award winner person.
Sommerfeld's greatest contribution to physics was the fine structure constant α he proposed. Countless famous physicists are fascinated by the number 137.
Before Pauli died, he felt refreshed because the ward room number he stayed in was 137; and Eddington was a loyal believer in the 137 cult. He believed that the reciprocal of the fine structure constant 1/α must and must be 137.
When he saw the new issue of the Annals of Physics, Sommerfeld happened to be at Stanford University, preparing for a lecture tomorrow.
*****
[1] Author's note: erg (erg) is the unit of energy and work in the centimeter-gram-second unit system (CGS). 1 erg (erg) is equal to 1 dyn (dyne). The force causes the object to move 1 cm in the direction of the force ( centimeters). The conversion relationship between erg and J (Joule), the unit of energy and work in the International System of Units (SI), is, 1erg=10^-7J. In addition, the conversion relationship between the unit of force dyn and N (Newton) is 1dyn=10^-5N.
