SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

The So-Called Vax

I think I can actually make sense of the Vaxers now. (And I’m going to call it the “treatment” from here forward.)

Everything they do makes sense (from their point of view, that is), if you assume that they believe the purpose of the treatment is to prevent the recipient from infecting others. It’s not to protect the recipient from others, it’s to protect others from the recipient.

(Now it is true that an actual vax helps slow the spread of the disease. I know you can sometimes transmit a disease if vaxed, but it’s more difficult if you don’t actually don’t catch it. But I am not talking about the side-benefit of a real vax; I’m talking about what they think of THIS treatment, where, apparently the only benefit it confers is to prevent people from transmitting it.)

Under those circumstances, they can consider you selfish for not wanting to protect others. After all you refuse to take a treatment that will prevent others from catching the disease from you. And, indeed, they do consider you “selfish” and not in the positive way that Ayn Rand used the term.

But it’s yet another one of those things where ONE non-compliant individual ruins it for everyone else–at least, that’s what they think it is. ONE untreated person could infect the entire human race, because they aren’t protected from him.

Never mind that this is not what a vaccine is supposed to be doing. If you assume that the motherf*cking toilet licker in front of you shrieking about how you’re Satan Incarnate for not being jabbed believes that the sole purpose of the treatment is to prevent the recipient from spreading the disease–not to prevent the recipient from catching it–suddenly his behavior makes sense, at least based on what he believes (and you can’t expect anyone to behave in accordance with things they don’t believe).

So perhaps the best way to argue with these people is to simply point out calmly that a vaccine (their word) is supposed to protect the recipient from those with the disease [which of course we say] not prevent them from giving it to other people [identify their false premise and face it head on] they might actually feel like they’re being argued with, rather than talked past.

If you don’t confront their actual premise, arguing with them can accomplish nothing.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).

Last week:

Gold $1,783.20
Silver $22.27
Platinum $950.00
Palladium $1,852.00
Rhodium $14,800.00

This week, markets closed for the weekend at 3:00 PM Mountain Time

Gold $1799.70
Silver $22.45
Platinum $947.00
Palladium $1868.00
Rhodium $14,900.00

Gold tried to break out yet again; apparently it got to $1810 yesterday. But it’s being smacked down again.

The James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a likely source of future developments in astrophysics. That thirty part series just concluded was historical developments in physics (with a healthy dollop of chemistry and astronomy to go along with it), but this column is about how we are going to do future developments.

JWST will be a big part of it.

That is, of course, if things go well. They’ve already gone over budget and longer than scheduled. But a LOT of things can still go wrong.

A couple of weeks ago I read that it was finally supposed to launch today, the 18th of December. Then I checked again as I wrote last week’s post and the launch date had been slipped to the 22nd, this time because of issues with the booster. (Thursday the 16th: It has now slipped to the 24th and it says “not earlier than” so clearly they expect to slip it again.)

That must be the 1,432,491,315^th schedule slip for this project, though someone will no doubt tell me I miscounted slightly. I probably forgot one from back in 2015.

In any case once it launches, the telescope is not out of the woods!!! It must move to a location well beyond any ability to send people to repair it, and then literally hundreds of mechanical devices have to work perfectly as the telescope deploys. They ground team that has to manage this process (to the extent that it can, rather than watching helplessly if something goes wrong) is sweating bullets.

They remember Hubble, whose mirror didn’t have the right curve, which was made useful–gloriously so–by Space Shuttle astronauts retrofitting it with “glasses.” If that, or some similar thing requiring “on the spot” repair happens to JWST, they are Shit Out of Luck because we can’t send people to where JWST will be.

And they remember the Galileo spacecraft sent to Jupiter, whose main antenna didn’t deploy because some widget stuck in place. The spacecraft could collect data…but sending it back to Earth was very difficult because the backup antenna was much smaller, with lower gain.

About a month after launch, we’ll know if it all deployed. Until then, reloaders might just want to hang around the ground crew to catch some of those bullets.

What Is It, And Why Does It Matter?

OK, so what IS the James Webb Space Telescope?

This thing looks like a radio dish antenna on some sort of weird four-deck toboggan, but it’s actually an infrared telescope. It will be sensitive to light from a wavelength of 600 nm all the way to 28,300 nm. (A nm is a nanometer, one billionth of a meter.) This is basically the lower half of the visible range (600nm to about 800nm), and then way down into the infrared.

This is exactly the sort of thing we will need to see further back in time, looking at galaxies and the first stars, the sorts of phenomena we think happened more than 13 billion years ago. Those things are simply redshifted too far for Hubble (which is quoted as only going to 1000 nm wavelength, but I’ve seen other things that indicate it can see further into the infrared) to even see.

Being able to see very early galaxies will shed some light on the question of how they develop into the shapes we’re used to seeing today (spirals, ellipticals, and so on.)

It will also be helpful looking for colder objects much closer to us, like extrasolar planets, debris disks, and Kuiper belt objects similar to Pluto, only much further out. Those debris disks will help answer the nagging questions about planetary system formation.

And it’s quite likely that JWST will be able to look at existing planetary systems and provide a lot of data there as well. If it’s able to detect oxygen atmospheres, that could even be a sign of life Out There.

I haven’t done a post on extrasolar planets, largely because when they were seen it wasn’t really a surprise. (It’d have been much more surprising if no extrasolar planetary systems had been found.) Except that some things we saw were indeed surprising. Perhaps some future Saturday.

OK, so let me describe the telescope itself.

The mirror is 6.5 meters–about 21 feet–across, and it’s made of those gold-colored hexagons. They’re actually gold-plated beryllium (and beryllium was chosen in large part because it is extremely light). Compare to Hubble’s single 7 foot mirror. This thing is designed to capture a lot of light. Or actually, it’s designed to capture as much very faint light as possible, to make up for it being faint. (That’s the ultimate reason to make telescopes larger. Their main purpose isn’t magnification, it’s capturing as much light from faint objects as possible.)

Any spacecraft has to fit inside the “fairing” (the cylindrical or conical compartment at the nose of the rocket), and 21 feet is wider than any fairing out there. Thus the three hexagons on the left, and the three on the right, are actually going to be folded back and will unfold in space. That’s just one of the many mechanical elements that has to work perfectly, Out There.

Since this telescope is designed to work in the infrared, there are a couple of important considerations that mean we can’t just stick the thing into low earth orbit (LEO) like the Hubble Space Telescope is. The first is that the sun, moon, and earth all glow in the infrared range. I don’t just mean that the earth and moon reflect infrared light like they do visible light from the sun, I mean that they themselves glow in infrared. Black body radiation means everything glows at some frequency. You glow in infrared, too. Night vision goggles work because they can see people (literally) glow in the dark.

So we do not want the moon and earth in the field of view; compared to the faint objects this telescope is designed to see, those will be zillion candlepower searchlights. So the idea is to put the telescope at the Earth Sun L2 point.

This is a point about four times as far away as the moon, but directly opposite of the sun (as seen from the earth). So the Sun, Earth, and JWST will all be on a straight line. JWST will actually orbit the sun, not the Earth, a bit further out from the sun than Earth is.

If it’s further out, won’t it orbit more slowly?

Under normal circumstances, that would be true, but if the spacecraft has both the earth and the sun in the same direction, it feels the gravitation from both at the same time, and in the same direction, so it will behave as if it were orbiting a slightly more massive body than the sun is, and that will speed it up. At a certain precise distance from the earth, it works out that the satellite will also orbit in one year, even though its orbit is larger. This only works, though, if it’s right on the extended line from the sun to the earth.

Here’s a GIF (not to scale) showing the sun and earth, and objects at all five Lagrange points. L2 is the one of interest here.

Note that at L2, the three obnoxious sources of infrared interference are always on the same side of the spacecraft (the moon will be fairly close to the earth, closer than L2 is). So it always has most of the sky to look at.

It will actually orbit about L2, in a ring perpendicular to the plane of Earth’s orbit (as shown in the video below).

But it will be four times further away than any astronaut has ever gone, and that was back in 1972 as part of Apollo. We are not going to be sending astronauts up to fix this thing if it goes FUBAR, like we could with Hubble.

It’s bad enough that we have to hope those mirrors unfold, and that then we can get them all aligned precisely to behave as one big mirror. (We have telescopes on earth that work like that–no more big, one-piece mirrors like at Palomar.) But then we have to deploy the heat shield. That’s the four layer toboggan in the diagram above.

Why does it need a heat shield?

In order to function properly, the telescope must be cold. 50K or 370 below zero Fahrenheit. That’s because if it’s any warmer than that the telescope itself will emit infrared radiation that would interfere with its observations.

This might confuse you. After all, it’s beneficial when walking around outside at night to have a headlamp on. Why not have the telescope illuminate what it’s looking at? Well, in the first place, what it’s looking at will be billions of light years away, so the illumination won’t reach it in our lifetimes and won’t matter a bit even if it did. (In fact, the illumination will probably never reach those distant galaxies; they’ve moved further away since they emitted the light we’re hoping to see, and are probably unreachable now even in principle.)

And in the second place, we’re not talking about a headlamp glowing, we are talking about the sensor itself glowing. Imagine if your eyelids, your corneas, your irises, and the very fluid inside your eyeballs was glowing brightly. And on top of this your retina were glowing brightly. In reality. the eye prevents most light from hitting the retina, just admitting enough to create the focused image–it cannot work, otherwise. But if light is coming from inside the eyeball, well, you’d be blind.

That four-layered toboggan is a heat shield; it’s made up of four layers of very thin reflectorized plastic that should act to prevent sunlight from heating the spacecraft. But it has to unroll and deploy into tight sheets that aren’t touching each other. And in certain ground-based tests, that thin film tore, which caused years of delay as they worked to fix that problem.

So those sheets will face the sun. On the underside of the sheets, not very visible in the picture, are solar panels, the downlink antenna, and so on. The solar panels will use the sunlight to power the JWST, and of course the antenna is there so we can download data and upload commands.

So here’s another picture of JWST showing the underside. This is the side that will face the sun, and Earth.

All of this has to deploy perfectly a million miles away…and that’s on top of the spacecraft actually having to reach its destination without the (comparatively simple, but still literally rocket science) rocketry going haywire.

I took a couple of classes on engineering things for space, not nearly enough to be qualified to work on something like this, but I do remember having them beat it into our heads to make the mission as simple as possible. The simpler it is the fewer things that can go wrong, and a mistake is very expensive.

Hundreds of things must go right once the spacecraft has launched. The complete unpacking and deployment should take about three weeks. Then the telescope has to cool.

This video claims a total of six months from launch, to doing work. Most of that time will be taken up with calibration and mirror alignment after the spacecraft “unfolds” in space. But as you watch this video keep in mind that all of the mechanical motions you see have to happen flawlessly, with nothing getting “stuck.”

It has been tested in labs on Earth, but those laboratories can’t duplicate everything in the space environment, and there’s always the chance that the last lab test of some part was the last time it’s going to work before it breaks.

That is why they are sweating bullets. Successfully launching the thing will only be the beginning of operational worries, and it’s the last time we will have full physical control of it.

A Long Road

The James Webb Space Telescope is actually a collaboration between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency. In fact, it will be launched from Kourou, in South America, which is the ESA’s launch facility. (It was shipped there recently under high security and secrecy.)

This telescope was first conceived in 1996. Twelve years later it passed its preliminary design review. In 2010 it passed another review indicating that as designed, it would achieve its mission. Launch was tentatively scheduled for 2015.

By 2010 it was suffering cost overruns (insert surprised face here) that were forcing cuts in other programs. (This is a high-priority item!) Add a lot of NASA-typical scheduling delays, and the JWST finally left California on a boat bound for French Guiana in late September of this year. The US share of the cost of building the thing was almost nine billion dollars.

And now we get to see if that money will pay off, or whether we’ll be looking at a very expensive failure.

If it does work well, it will advance our understanding of the universe by leaps and bounds. This must be an exciting (and nervewracking) time to be an astronomer or astrophysicist.

So Who Was James Webb?

Personally, I think a better name for this telescope would be for William Herschel who, after all, discovered infrared light. However, he also discovered Uranus (and tried to name it for a historic-level asshole, George III), so perhaps they’ll name a Uranus orbiter (not, so far as I know, even in planning stages right now) after him instead. That would work.

James Webb was the administrator of NASA from 1961-1968; in other words he oversaw the agency during the days of Mercury and Gemini, and the start of the Apollo program. He left shortly before the first manned Apollo flight…but had already had to deal with the aftermath of the tragic Apollo 1 fire. (Remember the names Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee, the three astronauts who died in that fire on January 27, 1967.)

Before he was at NASA, he served as Undersecretary of State from 1949-1952.

The “Next Generation Space Telescope” was renamed for James Webb in 2002.

Webb is an attempted target of “cancel culture.” Apparently while at State, he was active in an attempt to purge homosexuals from the department, so there have been a recent barrage of suggestions to rename the JWST, even including Harriet Tubman as a suggestion. A less ridiculous suggestion would be to name it after Sally Ride, who at least had something (quite a bit in fact) to do with space exploration.

With that current meat puppet in the White House, strings being pulled by every brand of leftist turd there is, who knows if anything will come of it. The other countries who are involved would probably have to approve a name change since they are footing part of the bill. I could see them maybe approving changing it to another NASA pioneer or scientist, but not Harriet Tubman.

Bonus Section: How Big Is the Universe?

The short answer is: Who knows?

We literally cannot know the answer to this question, because we simply cannot see anything further than 13.8 billion light years away; the light hasn’t had time to reach us. And you can subtract a few hundred thousand years from that as the Cosmic Microwave Background was generated that many years after the big bang.

Scientists talk of the “observable universe” for that reason. The entire universe is at least as big as the observable universe, but we don’t know if it’s one inch larger…or trillions of light years, or perhaps even infinitely large.

But it’s a mistake to figure the observable universe has a radius of 13.8 billion light years. Because since the light from the CMB and early stars and galaxies was created, they have continued to move away from us. By the time you account for this, the things we can (in principle) see today are now located within a sphere 92 billion light years across. And the items furthest away are already receding at a speed higher than that of light, which means that even though we can, today, see the light they emitted in the past, the light they are emitting today won’t reach us, ever.

If light speed is the speed limit, how is it that these things can be receding from us faster than light?

It’s true that you cannot move through space faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, but space itself can certainly stretch faster than that. Since it’s uniformly stretching, objects far enough apart will see the distance between them rise faster than light speed.

There are suggestions that the (total) universe must be at least 250 times the size of the observable universe; if I recall correctly this is from the error margins on the measurements that show space is flat. If it’s not quite flat but in fact is very slightly curved, our measurement method wouldn’t detect it; this comes from considering how curved it could be and still not be detected to be curved.)

My personal suspicion is that it’s infinite, but it’s very possible that we won’t ever know for certain.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).

Last week:

Gold $1819.00
Silver $24.25
Platinum $1042.00
Palladium $2117.00
Rhodium $15,500.00

This week, markets closed for the weekend at 3:00 PM Mountain Time

Gold $1866.10
Silver $25.42
Platinum $1091.00
Palladium $2195.00
Rhodium $15,100.00

According to people who read commodities and stock charts for a living, gold has definitely staged a “technical breakout.”

I suppose I should try to explain that statement. (If someone here actually does this for a living, please correct/amplify as warranted.) Apparently the movements of these sorts of prices generally follow certain patterns. For example, you might see something climb, peak, drop, climb again, peak even higher, then drop. Then it will climb again but reach a peak lower than the previous peak. Because you see three peaks with the one in the middle higher than the two on the sides, it’s called a “head and shoulders” pattern, and generally they expect to see the stock or commodity drop a lot coming off that third peak. There’s also a tendency for prices to move up and down in a narrow channel (which may itself be rising, falling, or staying the same). This sort of thing works well until it doesn’t; the idea is to spot when the current pattern is failing.

It also matters–a lot–the time range you’re using to look at the graph. Gold apparently was in a flagpole-and-pennant pattern, which ends with it bouncing up and down in a narrowing range (the pennant; it looks a bit like a triangle pointing to the right). When the point of the pennant is reached, a big move is expected. It could be up or down.

According to this analysis, we’re seeing the big move right now, and it’s up. The trick is knowing how far up it will go. Apparently if gold can break $1900 it’s expected to go to $2000, and at least one “expert” has said it’s likely to do so.

I have hedged my wording quite a lot, because these “rules” aren’t rules, they are tendencies and sometimes they do go wrong. If you decide to rush off and buy a 400 oz bar, and gold turns around and crashes unexpectedly dropping 300 bucks, and you lose $120,000…well, it’s not MY fault; I am NOT giving advice and even if I were, you wouldn’t have to follow it.

What am I going to do? Absolutely nothing. I have a position in gold and I don’t plan to alter it. I’ve learned that I absolutely suck at short-term plays.

Part XXV: The Particle Zoo

Introduction/Recap

We’re going back inside the atom again. Only natural since last time we were doing cosmology. And if that sounds like irony to you, it really isn’t. The two subjects are inextricably tied together; cosmologists pay a lot of attention to particle physics.

As of 1935, our picture of the “innards” of atoms consisted of electrons (very light particles with a “negative” electric charge) “orbiting” a much heavier nucleus (at least 1800 times the mass of the electrons, sometimes much more). That nucleus in turn consisted of “positive” charged protons (about the same number as electrons; in fact for an neutral, unionized atom, the exact same number) and (except in the case of Hydrogen-1, the most common atom in the universe by far) some number of neutrons. The electron and proton charges were equal in strength but opposite each other (making it mathematically natural to call one charge e and the other charge -e, as if they were mathematical opposites; however the assignment of -e to the electron was historical accident that goes back to Founding Father Benjamin Franklin). The neutron has no electric charge at all. The neutron and proton are almost exactly the same mass (the neutron is slightly heavier), roughly 1830 times the electron.

These particles all have some angular momentum, generally 1/2 or -1/2 of Planck’s reduced constant, ħ (pronounced “h-bar”).

We had also discovered that every one of these particles has an anti-particle of the same mass but opposite electric charge and spin. Bringing a particle and its anti-particle together causes a sort of mutual annihilation where the particles turn completely into energy. (Though some of the heavier particles release a mix of energy and lighter particles.) The anti-electron is also known as a positron; the others are simply anti-protons, anti-neutrons, and so on.

There was a solid theoretical argument for something called a neutrino, too (plus an anti-neutrino), but they’re hard to detect. (They did eventually get detected in the 1950s, but that’s getting ahead of things.)

Finally, there was the photon, the particle (though sometimes it behaves as a wave) of electromagnetic energy, whose spin is 1. The photon is its own anti-particle; or equivalently, it has no anti particle but plays the same role interacting with anti-particles as it does with particles.

These can be classified as follows (I’m going to leave out the anti-particles; they go into the same buckets as their corresponding particles):

bosons: Have an integer spin, and many can occupy the same quantum state: photon. You can think of these as “force carrying” particles, but only one of them was known in 1935.

fermions: Have a half-integer spin, and only one can occupy a particular quantum state: electron, neutrino, proton, neutron. These you can think of as “matter.” But you can divide these into leptons and baryons, meaning light and heavy. Electrons and neutrinos are leptons, protons and neutrons are baryons.

A brick of gold or anything else you can drop on your foot is made mostly (by weight) of baryons, and today we have occasion to call it “baryonic matter” (which implies there’s some kind of matter that is not “baryonic matter” but that’s another story for another day, soon).

Baryons, and only baryons, are subject to the strong nuclear force, which makes them stick to each other in nuclei in spite of the fact that protons repel each other electrically with simply ridiculous amounts of force. The strong force has to do with alpha radioactive decay.

Baryons and leptons both are subject to the weak nuclear force, as well.

The electron and proton have an electric charge, and are thus subject to the electromagnetic force as well, while the neutrino and neutron have no charge and aren’t subject to the electromagnetic force.

Finally, nuclear and particle physicists have a couple of quirks. They express energy in electron volts (eV), the amount of energy an electron gains after going through a potential of one volt. And that is exactly 1.602176634×10⁻¹⁹ joules.

Mass will be expressed in eV/c², electron volts divided by c². After all E = mc², so dividing energy by c² gives you a mass. When talking though, they’ll often just say the mass of such-and-such particle is so many eV and not bother saying “over see squared.” They all know what they mean, and I’m going to dispense with it here.

An electron has a mass of 511 keV (kilo electron volts, thousand electron volts). Protons and neutrons weigh in at 938.3 and 939.6 MeV (mega electron volts, million electron volts), respectively.

OK, that’s a recap!

The Muon

In 1935, Hideki Yukawa (1907-1981) took up the issue of the strong nuclear force. It seemed that there ought to be some particle that mediates it, just like photons mediate the electromagnetic force.

The strong nuclear force is very strong…over very short distances. It drops off to nothing rapidly thereafter. This could be explained if that mediating particle was unstable. If it can’t get far before it breaks down, the force it carries can’t get far either. But an even better “fit” comes from consideration of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It allows a particle to be created from nothing, but for a very short time. In other words, the energy can be “borrowed” for a brief period of time, but the more energy that is borrowed, the shorter the term of the loan.

So a particle about 200 times the mass of the electron could be created from nothing…but would have to disappear before it had a chance to move much more than the diameter of a proton. But while it was there, it could act to “carry” the strong nuclear force.

Of course, if there’s enough energy to create the particle conventionally, it will, perhaps, stick around long enough to actually be detected.

This was an intermediate mass particle, so it was named “meson” from a Greek word meaning “middle” (also appearing in “Mesoamerica” and “Mesozoic”).

Remember what I just said about “if there’s enough energy to create the particle conventionally”? One place where there’s a lot of energy is in cosmic ray collisions with atoms in our upper atmosphere.

And lo and behold the very next year, 1936, a particle about 200 times the mass of the electron was found as the product of such collisions by Carl D. Anderson (1905-1991), the same man who had discovered the positron in 1932. This meson had a charge of -e, the same as the electron, and it decayed in about 2.2 microseconds. Which seemed a bit long (this is an eternity when dealing with subatomic particles).

Neils Bohr suggested naming the particle the “yukon” (to honor Yukawa) and in fact, for a time that’s what many called it.

But it very quickly became apparent this actually was not Yukawa’s meson. It didn’t seem to want to have anything whatsoever to do with the strong nuclear force.

The more they looked at this meson, the more it looked like it was just like a heavy, unstable electron.

In 1947 another such particle was discovered by a collaboration led by Cecil Powell in England. This, indeed was the particle Yukawa was expecting. So, to distinguish the two, this new particle was called the pi-meson, and Anderson’s discovery was called the mu-meson.

More mesons were discovered, and the mu-meson turned out to be a real oddball; its name got shortened to “muon” and that’s the name it has to this day. It’s still, basically, an overweight, unstable cousin of the electron. It seemed to have no clear role in anything at all; in fact Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi very famously quipped, “who ordered that?” (Today in our “Brandon” age where certain four letter words are acceptable for display on flags for little kids to practice phonics on, he might have said, “WTF is this?!?” only spelled out.)

Muons today are famous for being excellent proofs of time dilation. The muons generated in the upper atmosphere (tens of miles up) by cosmic rays shouldn’t live long enough to move more than about 2200 feet on average (1 foot is almost exactly one nanosecond at light speed, a microsecond is a thousand nanoseconds). Yet they regularly manage to reach us here on the ground because their “clocks” run slower at the speed they are moving. This can also be checked in particle accelerators.

As time went on, the muon’s resemblance to the electron looked stronger and stronger; it’s now classified as a lepton, not a meson. Meanwhile, as I mentioned before, we started discovering other types of mesons.

And we started discovering new types of baryons as well.

Quite a lot of both.

Mesons (minus the muon, no longer considered a true meson) and baryons together shared the characteristic of being affected by the strong nuclear force. So as a class the two together were now named “hadrons.”

By 1956, people were talking about the “particle zoo” because there were so many different kinds of hadrons known.

Now let me make one thing perfectly clear. I’m going to throw a lot of particle names at you here; but the real point of this is later on. Once you’ve seen that point…forget about these particles. They do not matter, and never will to anyone outside a particle physics lab (who have to be able to identify them if only so they can ignore them–they’re noise).

Just for instance in the 1950s a (forgettable) baryon known as the delta particle, about 25 percent heavier than protons, was discovered. Its charge was +2e, twice that of the proton! Also discovered were three other particles of the same mass, with charges +e, 0, and -e. They all had 3/2 spin (not 1/2). These ended up all being called delta particles, with symbols Δ⁺⁺ , Δ⁺ , Δ⁰ , and Δ^–. Physicists tended to name these particles after Greek letters but had long since run out of them and were having to double, triple, and quadruple up on them.

In fact the pi meson (now called a pion) turned out to have three varieties, π⁺, π⁰ , and π^– . It turned out those delta particles would decay into combinations of pi particles, protons and neutrons (e.g., the double delta would decay into a proton and a positive pion, the neutral delta would decay into a neutron plus a neutral pion or a proton and a negative pion), and generally within about 5×10^-24 seconds!

This was just one piece of it. There was an obvious question. Why was there a double positive delta particle, but no double negative delta? This turned out to be a big clue, actually.

Here’s another one. There is a (forgettable) K meson, too, discovered in 1947. (And it’s K, not kappa.) Now shortened to kaon, it, too, comes in positive, neutral, and negative forms. K⁺, K⁰ , and K^–.

These lived much longer than pions or delta particles, about 1×10^-8 seconds.

This longer life eventually led to the recognition of a property that simply got called “strangeness,” at the suggestion of Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) [yes, we’ve reached the Trump administration.] It was conserved in fast reactions that seemed to have to do with the strong nuclear force, but not in slower reactions (like the kaon’s decay) that had to do with the weak nuclear force.

We eventually found baryons that had strangeness in them too, sometimes even in double doses. No baryon (other than the proton, and (almost) the neutron) was stable, but the strange ones were less unstable than the non-strange ones.

We now had scores of baryons and mesons…all of them supposedly fundamental particles, and very little rhyme or reason to the mess. That’s why we had the “particle zoo.”

Which, maybe, reminds you of something.

It’s like the way we were finding more and more chemical elements in the 1800s, all of them fundamental entities (or so we thought), and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to that mess either.

And what happened, in 1869, was the first good effort to find a way to organize them coherently, then in the 1890s, the discovery that they consisted of a handful of more basic particles.

And this is exactly what happened here.

Murray Gell-Mann (again), in 1961 found a way to organize these particles, working with their charge and their strangeness. They ended up, mostly, in groups of eight. There was a group of eight mesons with a single meson left over.

The baryons came in two groups:

There was also a baryon decuplet, where our delta particles show up:

This made things tidy, but just like the periodic table, there were strong hints of an underlying order. In the case of the periodic table, it turned out to be the precise ways electron orbitals would be defined by quantum mechanics. In this case, who knew?

The Ω particle at the bottom of the decuplet was not known in 1961. Gell-Mann predicted it in 1962 because it fit the logical progression, and a very close match for it was found in 1964. This was a lot like Mendeleyev predicting gallium and germanium, so it made it look like Gell-Mann was onto something.

Gell-Mann called this schema the eightfold way (inspired by Buddhism’s “eightfold path”).

It took a few decades for chemists to understand the underlying “message” of the periodic table.

It took exactly three years for the particle physicists to make a suggestion–the one which turned out to be correct–as to what was under this scheme.

Gell-Mann, and, independently, George Zweig (1937-still alive and kicking!) came up with what turned out to be the correct answer…though it would take quite some time to prove it and flesh it out.

All of these hadrons were made of something smaller, which got named quarks. There were three kinds of quarks. An “up” quark had a +2/3 charge. A “down” quark has a -1/3 charge. And so does a “strange” quark. Strange quarks are unstable, wanting to decay into up quarks. However, they are responsible for strangeness. All quarks have 1/2 spin (though they can sometimes be “upside down” with a -1/2 net spin).

The three different kinds of quarks are called different flavors of quarks.

[Up, down, strange, flavor..and you’ll soon see color names. Note a lot of English, instead of Latin or Greek. Even the name “quark” came from a poem written in English. This is why it all seems whimsical bordering on silly sometimes. “Up” versus “proton”–the word “proton” has far more gravitas.]

So how does this work?

Baryons consist of exactly three quarks.

A proton consists of two up quarks and a down quark (uud), and if you do the math, that’s a net +1 charge. A neutron consists of an up and two down quarks (udd) and again, doing the math, that’s a net 0 charge.

The delta particles cover all four possible combinations of up and down quarks (uuu, uud, udd, ddd) and doing the math you get charges, 2, 1, 0, and -1, respectively. The difference between the proton (uud) and the delta+ particle (uud) is the spin; deltas have 3/2 spin and protons 1/2 spin. (Similarly for neutrons and the delta-0 particle.) Now why isn’t there a uuu or ddd baryon with a 1/2 spin? This is excluded on quantum-mechanical grounds; a 3/2 spin is mandatory for these combinations.

Particles with strangeness have at least one strange quark. Those Σ particles (3 of them) have one strange quark each, the remaining question is whether the other two quarks will be uu, ud, or dd (three possibilities). The natural result is the decuplet shown, where the bottom member is three strange quarks, sss, making up the Ω.

Now these baryons start to make a sort of sense. What about the mesons?

As it happens, every quark has an anti-particle of the opposite charge, so there’s an anti-up with a -2/3 charge, for instance. A meson is a quark and an anti-quark. So you could pair an up with an anti-down to create a meson with 2/3 + (- 1/3) = 1 charge, and that’s the π⁺. The other two forms of pions are also formed from up and down quarks/anti-quarks; the negative pion is a down and an anti-up. The neutral pion turns out to be two different things. It is either an up+anti-up or down+anti-down pair and of course the two quarks right next to their own anti-particle don’t last long at all! (Neutral pions decay in about 10^-17 seconds, the others are good for about 10^-8 seconds, a billion times as long.)

Running all the combinations of up, down, strange and their opposite numbers gives nine possible mesons. And more arise when you consider different combinations of spin (which will be whole numbers in this case).

Again, the point is NOT to remember this stuff more than 10^-8 seconds after finishing the article (and if you remember it even that long, you’re strange), other than to remember the idea of quarks. So if your eyes are glazed over…that’s fine.

This whole theory was considered by many to be a completely abstract model with no bearing on reality, however, very similar to the Rutherford experiment with scattering alpha particles off of gold atoms, in 1968 someone was able to shoot things into protons and neutrons…and it became evident that there were things inside the proton and neutron. Still, scientists didn’t want to conclude that what was there were Gell-Mann/Zweig quarks, so they called them “partons” (nothing to do with Dolly…it’s off the word “part”).

As time went on it turned out that the quark model was correct, but there’s one more aspect to the story.

We’ve never seen a quark all by its lonesome. They seem to want to be in groups of three, or two (when one is an anti-particle). So either three quarks, or a (net) zero quarks!

Very shortly after the quark concept was introduced, Oscar W. Greenberg suggested that the strong force might actually have its own sort of charge. Except that instead of a positive and negative charge (two opposite charges, in other words) like electromagnetism, there might be three kinds of charges. Combining all three made a neutral strong charge.

Exactly like the way red, green and blue light add up to make white, but any combination of two of these will have some sort of color.

So in fact it’s now called “color charge” even though actual color has nothing to do with it. The three quarks in (say) a proton, consist of one “blue,” one “green,” and one “red” quark (and it doesn’t really matter which one is which). They add to white, no color charge.

A meson, with a quark and anti-quark, will have, say, a “red” and “anti-red” (or cyan) charge, again, net result white, no color charge. (It’s almost always called “anti-red”, “anti-green” or “anti-blue” never cyan, magenta and yellow.)

And it turns out the strong nuclear force is actually an indirect manifestation of the strong force (note: no word “nuclear”) between the quarks. In other words the proton-proton attraction within the nucleus is not the primary manifestation of the force. Rather, the strong force keeps the protons and neutrons themselves together. It’s sort of like theorizing that a rubber band seems to have a “rubber band” force to it, but then finding out what’s really at the bottom of it is electromagnetic forces between atoms and molecules in the rubber band.

The strong force is, fundamentally, carried by particles called gluons (which are bosons of zero spin). They have mass, but more importantly, they themselves have “color” are subject to the strong force, unlike photons which aren’t subject to the force they carry. So two quarks exchange virtual gluons, and the virtual gluons themselves can exchange more virtual gluons. That turned out to be a very interesting computational problem, largely aided by “Feynman diagrams” invented by Richard Feynman.

Who, by the way, hated the color names; he thought they would be confusing and even called his colleagues “idiot physicists” for using the term.

As it turns out the only force capable of changing the flavor of a quark is the weak force. And weak interactions tend to take more time (or equivalently, are less likely), which is why those strange baryons and hadrons took so long to decay: The strange quark had to change to an up quark, and that’s a slow process because it requires the weak force.

More Recent Developments

Having two quarks with -1/3 charge but only one of 2/3 charge was an imbalance that nagged at people; so almost immediately, there were suggestions there should be a fourth quark…which got the name “charm.” So there would be two “generations” of quarks: up/down made one, and charm/strange made another. This sort of matched the leptons, where there was an electron and a muon which could be considered a second generation.

Today, it’s stated that the strange quark was detected in 1968.

In 1973 a third generation was suggested, called top and bottom. (I distinctly remember hearing them called “truth” and “beauty” as a kid…and I did not realize they didn’t actually mean truth and beauty, so I just shook my head and probably at least thought the word “bullshit” at the thought that they were claiming to have found particles of actual truth and beauty. Fortunately almost no one calls them that today.)

In 1974 the charm quark was detected. The Bottom quark followed in 1977. The top quark is quite a lot more massive (about as massive as a gold atom!) and wasn’t found until 1995.

Similarly, there are three generations of “electron.” The tau particle or tauon was first speculated on in 1960, and detected in 1974-75. Its half life is about 10^-13 seconds. So the stable of leptons is filling out too.

There are a couple more chapters in this story. One, I think I can disregard. The other one I can’t…but I will save it for later. Interestingly, it has to do with that odd bit about the sun only producing 1/3 of the neutrinos anticipated.

OK, now that you know what quarks are…forget the kaons, delta particles, sigmas. xis, and omegas. None of these will ever show up in your kitchen and even the pion isn’t a household word by any means. And you’re unlikely to ever see strange, charm, top and bottom quarks, either (though they’re easier to remember). Muons? Occasionally thanks to cosmic rays. Tauons? Never.

The ones that exist outside a physics laboratory or a smashup in the upper atmosphere are the first generation, the electron, up and down. Everything you see around you, everything you can drop on your foot, is made up of those. The others are exotic and evanescent. They only matter (pun intended) to particle physicists.

And cosmologists.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).

Last week:

Gold $1762.00
Silver $22.65
Platinum $981.00
Palladium $2000.00
Rhodium $14,050.00

This week, markets closed for the weekend at 3:00 PM Mountain Time

Gold $1758.00
Silver $22.75
Platinum $1031.00
Palladium $2167.00
Rhodium $14,850.00

Gold and Silver are holding steady…ridiculously so in fact. I read speculation that they’re going to bust out and surge. Why shouldn’t they? Inflation is galloping, the economy is headed for trouble once (some of) the companies out there actually stick to the jab mandate.

Platinum and palladium have taken decent jumps. Rhodium is up $800. That’s not too shabby either.

Personally? I’m liable to end up unemployed. I should buy a “I can’t afford to fix or replace this because of J** B*d*n” bumper sticker for my rear-ended car.

Part XXI: Nuclear Physics Uses The Hammer

Introduction

Last time I said that this time I’d take up stars. But I did some preliminary research on the history, and realized that we’re not quite there from a historical standpoint as our narrative is basically in the 1930s (except when I run ahead to finish something that started in the 1930s, like I did with neutrinos).

So I’m going to pick up the story of neutrons. Discovered in 1932 by James Chadwick, they turn out to be the “other” nucleon in the nucleus, supplementing protons. Similar in mass but with no electric charge, they were the actual occupants of the place in the nucleus that we had imagined held proton-electron pairs.

Because a neutron bears no electric charge, it has no trouble getting close to a nucleus and sticking to it, whereas a proton is repelled by any nucleus it approaches. If it can get close enough it will stick…but first it has to get close enough, and that’s a challenge. The same is true of alpha particles (which are bundles of two protons and two neutrons).

The “sticking” is provided by the strong nuclear force.

It’s as if you had two magnets, and were trying to bring the north poles close together. They push each other apart pretty hard, but if the magnets were covered with velcro, they’d stick together…once you overcame that repulsion.

Free neutrons are basically a new form of radiation, by the way; we have alpha and beta radiation (that bundle of four nucleons, and an electron, respectively), gamma radiation (a very high energy photon, X-rays on steroids), and now, we have free neutrons.

Free neutrons are scary. They’ll simply wander around until they find a nucleus to stick to…and they will more than likely make that nucleus radioactive. I don’t mind being around alpha and beta sources (so long as they’re not inside of me); they’re trivial to shield against. Gamma rays are intimidating because they penetrate very thick shielding. All three of these, if they get to you, will blast some chemical bond to smithereens which can either mean nothing or cause big problems, depending on what it was they hit. They won’t make you radioactive. But the neutrons just sort of wander aimlessly through matter, unaffected by very much until they find a nucleus–and nuclei don’t take up much space, in fact they take up virtually none of it. Whatever nucleus they hit becomes a new (and likely radioactive) isotope.

That nucleus, with the extra neutron, may find itself with “too many” neutrons, and one of the neutrons will then change into a proton, via the weak force. This has the effect of making that atom a different element, the one next over to the right on your handy-dandy periodic table. That increases the atomic number, Z, by 1, while leaving the mass number (the total number of protons and neutrons) the same.

OK, that’s the end of the review. Now on with the story, which is complicated. I apologize in advance if this is completely un-followable. And if I somehow managed to garble it in trying to simplify it, I apologize for that as well. [Most of this is from the Wikipedia article on Lise Meitner, and the article on the discovery of fission.]

Transmutation

Nuclear physicists had all kinds of fun playing with neutrons through the 1930s (and beyond). Enrico Fermi, in Rome, made a hobby of bombarding different elements with neutrons to see what would happen; first creating a more neutron rich isotope of the starting element, then monitoring the beta decay, determining half lives and energies, which are different for each isotope. Sometimes there’d be multiple decays, because one wasn’t enough to get to a stable isotope.

Remember, each such beta decay moves you one to the right, to the next higher atomic number. This led to an irresistibly tantalizing question.

What happens if you pick the element with the highest atomic number, uranium with Z=92, and bombard it with neutrons?

Shouldn’t you get element 93, previously utterly unknown, in fact, previously nonexistent?

Fermi tried it. And he got a whole bunch of different kinds of beta radiation out of it. He concluded that he had created a “transuranic” element. Not so fast though. Aristid von Grosse suggested that what Fermi had found was a new isotope of protactinium (element 91, not 93). This “wait a minute” wasn’t enough to prevent Fermi’s winning the 1938 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work, not just with uranium but the other elements as well.

But there was enough controversy that someone needed to dig in and figure out if we were looking at element 93 or protactinium.

And who better to do that than Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, the discoverers of protactinium? Their collaboration at Kaiser Wilhelm institute in Berlin had lapsed, but this question got the two of them back together. From 1934-1938 the two of them, along with Otto Frisch, dug into the matter.

Initially, Meitner and Hahn believed they had created elements 93, 94, 95 and even 96. But as time went on Meitner became less certain.

Part of the muddle came from the fact that it was wrongly believed that only the lanthanide elements had that special row at the bottom of the table, pulled out from the main body so it would fit nicely on a landscape piece of paper. Actinium was placed two spots below yttrium, thorium below hafnium, protactinium below tantalum and uranium below tungsten (or as the Germans called it, “wolfram”). Indeed the chemical behavior of these elements could be a bit confusing, but it would eventually turn out that that stopped with element 93, which behaved more like a lanthanide. That whole sequence of elements in fact belonged in a second footnote row below the lanthanides.

For example, Fermi had found a rhenium-like element in his experiments and, in the belief that element 93 was directly below rhenium in the periodic table, concluded that that is what he had found. (In fact, he had found technetium, the then-undiscovered element above rhenium in the table, and didn’t realize it–but I’m getting ahead of myself here.)

This mistaken belief, at the time, bunged up any attempt to chemically analyze the products of the neutron bombardment. When element 93 is expected to behave like rhenium, for instance, rather than like a rare earth, it’s kind of difficult to figure out what’s going on.

One thing Meitner and Hahn wer fairly confident of: when they bombarded uranium, which was mostly uranium-238 (92 protons and 146 neutrons), they were indeed getting, as step one, uranium-239, with a 23 minute half life. They were able to do chemistry on it and prove that it was, indeed uranium.

After that it was a muddle. There seemed to be three different reactions, all from uranium-239, one with a ten second half life, one with a twenty second half life, and one with a 23 minute half life.

In 1937 Meitner and Hahn each published a report. Hahn was emphatic that they had found transuranic elements (“Above all, their chemical distinction from all previously known elements needs no further discussion”); Meitner was pretty certain almost everything was a product of uranium-238, somehow, but figured the three most prominent products were isomers.

Er, what’s an isomer?

As if it isn’t difficult enough to recall that elements come in isotopes, with the same number of protons but different number of neutrons, it turns out that some of the isotopes themselves come in different forms, some more energetic than others, and that the more energetic form eventually just blasts out pure energy (a gamma ray photon) and settles down to become the less energetic, and (usually) more stable form, having kept all of its protons and neutrons intact (but, likely, having dropped mass a bit). An isotope like this gets an “m” after the number.

For example, consider protactinium-234m, which has a 1.17 minute half life, and ejects a photon as it settles down to become protactinium-234, with a half life of 6.70 hours. When Pa-234m was discovered in 1913, we weren’t clear on the concept of isotopes, so it was considered a new element and named brevium for its brief half life.

When “regular” Pa-234 was discovered in 1921, that marked the discovery of nuclear isomers; it was the first such distinction between an “m” isotope and a “regular” isotope. And, interestingly, the discoverer was Otto Hahn, who later on in 1937 found his colleague using the concept to argue against his interpretation of the U-239 decay products!

[Side note: Probably the most useful isomer today is technetium-99m. It’s a decay product of molybdenum-99, which has about a 30 hour half life. Mo-99 is sent to hospitals, which extract the Tc-99m chemically, embed it in larger molecules, perhaps favored by muscles, then inject that into patients and watch where the gamma rays come from. This can be used to diagnose heart problems, though it does mean the patient is a source of gamma rays for a while. Tc-99m has a six hour half life, after which it blasts out a fairly weak gamma ray and settles down to Tc-99, which has a much longer half life (hundreds of thousands of years) and will ultimately beta decay and become ruthenium-99. The patient generally gets rid of the technetium-99 within days, so no digging up bodies to try to get the ruthenium, please.]

Meitner concluded her report with the following:  “The process must be neutron capture by uranium-238, which leads to three isomeric nuclei of uranium-239. This result is very difficult to reconcile with current concepts of the nucleus.”

Another group in Paris decided to investigate as well. They ultimately found a product that was chemically very similar to lanthanum (element 57). (It turned out it couldn’t be more similar, as it was lanthanum, but I get ahead of myself again.)

Did I just almost forget to mention Meitner was Jewish?

What does that matter? Normally it wouldn’t matter in the slightest, but in mid 1930s Berlin, it mattered a great deal. And it was mattering more and more as time passed.

Meitner Has To Flee

Meitner had been kept safe, somewhat, by the fact that she was an Austrian, but on March 12, 1938, Austria was annexed by Germany. Her Austrian citizenship was moot as there was no Austria to be a citizen of. Niels Bohr and Paul Scherrer invited her to take positions in Denmark and Switzerland, respectively, but Carl Bosch at KWI said she could remain. By May, though, Meitner learned that her situation was being looked at by the no-doubt misnamed Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture.

Although many people outside of Germany wanted to give her refuge, there were all sorts of bureaucratic snafus. For instance, she couldn’t go to Denmark no matter how much Niels Bohr wanted her there, because Denmark considered Austrian passports to be invalid. Germany also forbade academics to leave the country.

By July the situation was critical. Dirk Coster, a Dutch scientist, convinced the Netherlands to accept Meitner, and on July 12, she showed up for work at KWI as usual, staying late to mark up an associate’s paper for publication. The next day she and Coster took a train on a lightly used rail line to the Dutch border. Otto Hahn had given her his mother’s ring and “Frau Professor” was apparently thought to be the wife of the Dutch professor, so the German border guards didn’t stop her. She got out, with ten marks and her summer clothes, and the ring she could sell for money if needed. (The story is much more complex, and given in the Wikipedia article on Meitner.)

Once Meitner was safely out of Nazi Germany, work continued long-distance. Hahn and Strassman at KWI decided to try to replicate the Paris group’s results, and found what they thought was radium (element 88).

Figuring that the neutron hitting uranium-238 was creating uranium-239, which then gave up two alpha particles to become radium-231, they dug a little more carefully, and decided to extract the radium from the sample.

Radium lies directly under barium (element 56) on the periodic table (it was properly understood back then, unlike uranium), and the two elements have an affinity with each other. If there was any radium in the products, barium could be used to draw it out, then it could be separated from the barium without interference from all the other “stuff” in the sample.

Indeed, the barium came out radioactive, indicating that there was radium in it. So it looked like they had found their radium, and the two alpha decays.

But then they couldn’t separate the radium from the barium.

The extraction process used was tested by putting known samples of radium into the barium, and they were separated out without any trouble.

The Light Dawns

Finally they were forced to conclude that the reason they couldn’t find any radium in the barium, is that it was barium.

A radioactive isotope of element 56 was coming out of uranium-239.

Meitner and Frisch finally realized that what was happening. They had gotten together for Christmas in 1838, and were out cross-country skiing having a rather atypical conversation.

What if, they thought, the uranium nucleus were simply splitting? The prevailing model of the nucleus was called the “liquid drop” model, treating it as similar to a drop of liquid; if it were under enough tension that it wanted to break up, a neutron could add just enough “oomph” to happen, just like a very large drop of water wants to split into smaller drops. (Incidentally the liquid drop model, though not the most advanced model, is still good enough to be of some use today.)

However the two pieces would find themselves outside the range of the strong nuclear force, and repel each other quite forcefully. About 200 million electron volts–about a fifth the mass/energy of a proton–would be released as the two pieces flew apart. Where would it come from?

Meitner was able to figure out that the two pieces’ binding energy was high enough compared to the uranium’s binding energy that the 200 MeV would be supplied by that.

It fit.

Nuclear fission was real.

Uranium could be induced to split and release a lot of energy. The lanthanum, technetium and barium were real. It just depended on exactly how the split happened, which particular smaller elements you’d get.

When Frisch told Niels Bohr of this, Bohr literally smacked his own forehead and exclaimed, “What idiots we have been!”

Fermi was also embarrassed; that part of his work bombarding things with neutrons that had to do with uranium turned out to be misinterpreted, and the 1938 Nobel prize he had just been told he would receive was in part awarded for his transuranium “discoveries.” Just in time though; he added a footnote to his acceptance speech to explain what they had just figured out.

In the fullness of time, it developed that those 10 and 20 second reactions Meitner, Hahn and Frisch were seeing were fission products. But the 23 minute reaction really was a decay into element 93, isotope 239.

And it was the small amount of uranium-235 that was fissioning, not the uranium-238.

And we now had a new form of radioactive decay: fission, spontaneous fission. Uranium 236’s most common decay mode is this.

The Bomb

The rest of the story is much more famous, though at the time it was shrouded in secrecy. The US government, alerted by none other than Albert Einstein’s letter to FDR concerning the potential of such massive releases of energy, created the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear bomb.

Much of this early research had been done in Nazi Germany. What if they, too, were working on The Bomb?

It turns out that when uranium-235 is hit by a fairly slow moving neutron, it becomes, for just an instant, uranium-236, which is what fissions into two large pieces. But there are also two or three bare neutrons released; if they can be slowed down and then induced to hit more uranium-235, you can have a chain reaction, each step doubling or even tripling the energy release as more and more uranium-235 catches neutrons and releases yet more neutrons.

However, you need a fairly substantial amount of U-235 for this to work. If it’s a small lump of the stuff, the freed neutrons will probably exit the sample before they find a nucleus to hit. There’s a critical mass that must be brought together for the chain reaction to take off.

The bigger difficulty, of course was that uranium-235 is only a small fraction, less than one percent, of uranium.

So one of the two approaches taken was to try to extract “enriched” uranium-235 from uranium by reacting the uranium with fluorine to create uranium hexafluoride gas, which could then be centrifuged to separate out the slightly lighter U-235. This work was done at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Once you have the enriched uranium-235, it’s dead easy to make a bomb. Bring two small masses together, enough to make a critical mass, make sure there’s a neutron source nearby, and, KABOOM!!

The other approach involved those transuranics. Uranium-239 was beta decaying into neptunium-239; neptunium 239 was in turn beta decaying into plutonium-239. The two new elements were named to continue the series. Uranium had been named after the planet uranus; the next two elements were named after neptune and pluto (then believed to be a planet).

And it turns out that plutonium-239 is easy to produce; just bombard regular uranium with neutrons–and it too will fission when struck by a neutron. The trick is to get enough of it together close enough that the excess neutrons will find another plutonium-239 atom before exiting the mass. As it happens, Pu-239 must be compressed for it to work. And getting that to happen precisely right was a challenge.

It’s a good thing that the easy-to-make bomb requires the hard-to-make material, and the easy to make material is hard to make a bomb out of.

But we did both.

The U-235 bomb was deemed so simple it wouldn’t need a test. Thus it was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 (Germany had surrendered in May of that year, after millions had given their lives to put the mad dictator Hitler down). It worked beautifully, releasing energy equivalent to about 20 thousand tons of TNT, all at once.

The Pu-239 bomb, however, was the first nuclear detonation. It was tested at Trinity site in New Mexico on July 16th, then a second example was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th.

The bombs killed tens of thousands of people, but likely saved at least ten times as many lives. Had the United States needed to invade the Japanese home islands, there likely would have been two million casualties.

The neutron had gone from being an abstract thing cared about only by some physicists trying to figure out what keeps atoms together…to something as impossible to ignore as a slap across the face.

And this wasn’t even the end of that road.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

False Flag?

I think in some cases people on our side misuse False Flag. Unless, of course “FF” stands for something else.

This became apparent to me when I had a very valuable conversation with DePat and FG&C about the notion that the Arizona Audit people were waiting for a “FF” before dropping their results. Once FG&C explained what he meant by FF, it made a LOT more sense than it did with my reading of the term.

I first heard the term False Flag many, many years ago in an intelligence context. It’s a method of recruiting spies. The signature example is the KGB “handler” who finds someone in his host country who has access to classified information and is sympathetic to Israel, then arranges to meet the Israel sympathizer “by chance.” Once he does so he lets slip that he is an agent…but not for the USSR, rather for the Mossad. He’ll even explain that he knows government employees aren’t supposed to leak sensitive stuff but if the sympathizer could just alert him to harmless stuff, it’d help Israel out.

Before the Israel sympathizer knows it, he’s “helping Israel” a lot more than that, but in fact he’s really passing stuff on to the Soviet Union.

The thing that makes it “false flag” is that the Soviet agent, whose flag SHOULD be red with a yellow hammer and sickle in the upper left, is (figuratively) displaying a false flag–that of Israel.

In the more modern United States Cold Civil War context, a false flag is when some leftist does something while pretending to be on the Right, in the hopes that it will damage the Right politically. This is everything from posting a bunch of stereotypical “right wing hate” on the internet then going off and shooting up a black church (to prove “right wingers are racists”) to…well, January 6 with Antifa pretending to be “right wing militia” types–which was very damaging to us.

Just like the Soviet agent was pretending to be an Israeli agent, the leftist douchebag(s) is (are) pretending to be on the Right politically.

I can’t be certain but I suspect some conflate this with something different: A big spectacular event staged to distract from something they don’t want you to notice. False flags can certainly do this (have some “right wing nut” shoot up a school and that will indeed saturate the media for a few days) but not all such things are “false flags” because many of these events don’t try to discredit the Right.

Now the Opposition does pull that trick too, and quite often, but when they do so, it’s not a “false flag,” it’s something else with a name that may just be best described as “distraction” or “misdirection” (the magician’s term for such a tactic). Basically the staged event sucks all of the oxygen out of the media room and nothing else gets looked at for some short period of time (a day to a week). It doesn’t matter if it ends up making the Right look bad (though if it does, bonus!!!), if it keeps people from noticing something else that happened, the operation was a success.

In this particular instance, the suggestion was that the Audit Results We Have All Been Waiting For are being timed to drop when disgust with Biden reaches a (new) all time high. This is certainly plausible though I would have a multitude of detail questions about it before I’d go beyond that. But what this scenario does NOT describe is a “false flag.”

OK, that off my chest…lets hope that Arizona Audit drops soon. If that implies something else must happen first, then let THAT happen, already! Too much death and destruction is being meted out by the Biden Facade Administration and the people behind it.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).

Last week:

Gold $1817.80
Silver $24.08
Platinum $1016.00
Palladium $2498.00
Rhodium $18,400.00

This week, markets closed for the weekend at 3:00 PM Mountain Time

Gold $1828.60
Silver $24.77
Platinum $1032.00
Palladium $2506.00
Rhodium $17,750.00

Gold broke out and up into the 1830s this week but much of that gain was lost by close on Friday. Silver is up a bit too, the PGMs however are down (or steady).

I attended a talk about the silver market last week; the speaker actually alluded to the folks who pushed the price of the gaming company in order to try to bankrupt a bunch of institutional traders, and then went on to try the same with silver. He described their effort as a failure (and from what I’ve seen so far, their effect on silver prices was, in fact, minimal). However one effect that they did have was they got me to post articles on the nine precious metals AND give these updates every week.

Part XVII: Nuclear Physics Finds A Hammer

Introduction

Today, there is a subdiscipline of physics called “nuclear physics.” It deals with the nucleus of the atom, but does not typically dive any deeper than that (and there is most assuredly a “deeper than that” today known as “particle physics,” though there was no hint of its existence in the 1920s).

The sorts of investigations Rutherford and Co. performed in the first two decades of the 20th century were the very beginning of nuclear physics, though it’s often not considered to have been founded until 1932.

Why 1932? That’s the subject of today’s story.

There’s a modern trope among nuclear physicists. Someone asks “how do you find out what’s inside an atom” and the response is: “Just like a toddler trying to figure out what’s inside an alarm clock. He gets a hammer, smacks it, and sees what flies out of it.”

When we left off the physicist’s best subatomic hammer was the alpha particle, known to be a bare helium nucleus, mass number A = 4, electric charge +2. This would come flying out of certain atoms (like those of uranium and thorium) when they underwent what is called “alpha decay.” This process would reduce the atomic number (i.e., the element number, Z) of the parent nucleus by 2, and reduce its mass number, A, by 4. So uranium-238 (the isotope of uranium, Z=92, A=238) would become thorium-234; the mass number has decreased by four, and thorium is element #90, so the atomic number has dropped by 2.

Physicists used these alpha particles with some limited success as hammers to hurl at nuclei. In fact, that was how the nucleus had actually been discovered; Rutherford used alpha particles as a hammer on gold atoms and found there was a lot of empty space in an atom, but a very small hard kernel in the middle that would cause the alpha particles to ricochet. Physicists had even figured out how to give alpha particles more energy, by using electrically charged plates and so forth to get them to speed up.

But here’s the problem. The nucleus has a positive electrical charge, a substantial one. And an alpha particle, also a nucleus, has its positive electrical charge, too. And like charges repel each other.

Imagine if your hammer, and the nail you were trying to hit with it, strongly repelled each other. That’s a recipe for deciding a hammer is for hitting your thumb with, isn’t it? (Or perhaps your wrist, or even your face if the hammer bounces back at a sharp angle.)

Alpha particles were, to put it mildly, suboptimal as nuclear hammers.

There was also another glaring mystery in the early 1920s. What actually held a nucleus together?

As far as they knew back then, the nucleus of (say) oxygen-16 (Z=8, A=16) held a mixture of protons and electrons, 16 relatively heavy protons to give it the 16 mass number, and eight very light electrons (1/1836th the mass of a proton) to cancel out the charge of eight of the protons, leaving a net charge of 8, which was recently understood to be the very definition of an oxygen nucleus–a charge of eight.

It certainly looked as if there were electrons in a nucleus; consider beta decay. This is when the nucleus spits out an electron and goes up one in charge. For instance, the thorium-234 I referenced will spit out an electron (in this context, it’s known as a “beta particle”), uncovering another proton, raising the atomic number, therefore. from thorium’s Z=90 to Z=91, which means it’s now a protactinium-234 nucleus. So it certainly seemed as if nuclei had electrons in them; otherwise how on earth do electrons end up coming out of the nucleus during beta decay?

So let’s consider a helium-4 nucleus; under this model it contains four protons and two electrons. Those four protons can actually all touch each other (you can convince yourself of this with marbles, ping pong balls, or billiard balls). What keeps them from flying apart? The protons are all positively charged; and there are only two electrons to cancel that repulsion out.

Well, let’s list what we know about protons:

mass = 1.672×10⁻²⁷ kg
electric charge, e = 1.602×10⁻¹⁹ C
radius = 0.8414 fm

[e is the symbol used for the electrical charge of a proton in particular; an electron has charge –e.]

[“fm” is “femtometer,” a femtometer is 10^-15 meters, or a quadrillionth of a meter. Most people have heard the “nano” prefix, meaning one billionth; fewer have heard of pico (one trillionth), femto (one quadrillionth) or atto (one quintillionth).]

We can get an appreciation of the size of the problem by simply computing the electrical repulsive force between two protons that are touching each other. Their center-to-center distance is double the radius, or 1.6828×10^-15 m, so we can plug everything into Coulomb’s Law to see how big the force is:

The vertical bars stand for “magnitude” (in other words, drop the vector stuff and just deal with the scalar values, because we want a size, not a direction.)

both Q values are the charge of the proton, e, and K = 8.988×10⁹ Nm²/C². You can do the math.

The answer I got is 81.456 newtons.

NOT 81.456 billionths of a newton, or trillionths of a newton, but 81.456 newtons. That’s the weight of 8.3 kilograms (81.456 N/(g=9.8 m/s²)) under Earth gravity.

This much force, between two itty, bitty, teensy, tiny particles!!! It’s an actual macroscopic amount of force. It’d be as if a proton could hit you so hard it’d be like taking a 60 mph pitch on the chin.

(Actually, now that you mention it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle.)

The force is enormous compared to the size of the particles.

Since all four of the protons in the alpha particle touch each other, each proton is being repelled by three times this much force (244+ newtons). The two electrons that are attached to two of the protons attract with 167 newtons, but that still leaves 81 1/2 newtons of repulsion unbalanced, and that’s simply yuge.

Well, that’s the electromagnetic force. There’s one other force that could come into play: Gravity.

Now a physicist would know, instantly, that gravity doesn’t matter more than a mouse fart in a hurricane here, but many of you don’t, so let’s just check that.

The radius is the same, but the numbers of the masses are much lower than the numbers of the charges, roughly 1/100,000,000 as much. And G is only 6.67×10^-11, much much less than K was, very roughly 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000 as much.

I get 6.59 x 10^-35 newtons.

“Drop in the bucket” doesn’t begin to describe that number in comparison to 81.456 newtons. Basically a quintillionth of a quintillionth the amount.

Nuclear physicists generally ignore gravity as a force between the objects they study. There’s no way its effect could even be measured as a fraction of the electromagnetic effect.

So, by everything known in the 1920s, nuclei should simply fly apart, in a nanojiffy. Or perhaps an attojiffy. The two fundamental forces act in opposite directions, but gravity shows up like Biden’s rally crowds showed up last year (and gravity can’t cheat to make up for that).

So by rights any nucleus bigger than hydrogen’s one-proton nucleus should simply fly apart. It should never have formed to begin with.

Since we’re still here, and not simply big Swalwellian clouds of hydrogen gas, clearly something else, something new, is at work.

And that is today’s story.

Can Nuclear Electrons Actually Exist?

Leaving aside the fact that the nuclear electrons can’t, all by themselves, keep a nucleus together, there was plenty of reason to question whether nuclear electrons even existed at all. There are, essentially, three reasons that I could explain to you. Number Three had to do with Dirac’s Equation which came along in 1928 and I want to save for another column. So going back to the other two reasons…

Issue #1: Binding Energy

In the introduction I described the prevailing model of the atomic nucleus as of the 1920s. Ernest Rutherford made the suggestion around 1919, but he decided shortly afterwards that it didn’t make sense; and this is one reason why.

One of the still-standing 1895 puzzles has to do with atomic weights. The atomic weight of, say, carbon is not quite twelve times that of hydrogen. Even after accounting for the presence of atoms with different mass numbers (uncommon isotopes of the same element), it still doesn’t quite work out; even accounting for all those nuclear electrons…it doesn’t work out.

In fact, heavier atoms (i.e., heavier than hydrogen) are always lighter than they would be if they were simple multiples of the proton’s mass, much less including some nuclear electrons as well. Even hydrogen-2 (deuterium) is less than twice the mass of hydrogen-1 (protium).

This, it turns out is due to something called binding energy. It’s the energy required to pull the protons apart.

This is directly analogous to the binding energy between, say, you and the earth. How much energy would it take to separate you from earth? At least as much as it would take to accelerate you to escape velocity. This is gravitational binding energy, because it’s the force of gravity that creates the potential difference between you standing on the surface of the earth, and you out in interstellar space.

It takes, very roughly, 7 million electron volts (MeV) to pull a proton out of a nucleus. Alternatively, if a proton is shoved into a nucleus, 7 MeV is released (just like, as you fall from a great height, you release a lot of kinetic energy).

That energy actually shows up on the books as missing mass. E = mc², after all. So the particles in a large nucleus are all just a bit lighter in weight than they would be if they were separated; to separate them you have to add enough energy to make up the mass deficit.

If you were able to convert an entire proton to energy, it’d yield 938 MeV. The binding energy is therefore about seven tenths of one percent of the total mass/energy of the nucleus. We can actually measure that shortage…and, it turns out, had been measuring it for decades. This is the reason for the discrepant atomic masses.

Another sort of binding energy is the electromagnetic binding energy, keeping electrons in atoms. This ranges from a fraction of a single electron volt, to a bit over a dozen electron volts, for hydrogen. Is some fraction of the mass of an atom disappearing during chemical reactions, when chemical energy is released? The theory says yes. But it’s a small enough change (roughly one millionth the size of the nuclear binding energy) we haven’t actually measured it…yet.

I tried to discover exactly when this was first explained. It was sometime before the 1920s. Wikipedia says Einstein did it in 1905, but it simply points to the fact that he derived E=mc² that year; I can’t quite nail down that he said, in that paper, that this is why nuclei heavier than protium are all lighter than they “should” be. If he did say that then, then I should have crossed off yet another mystery the week I talked about the incredible year Einstein had in 1905. If someone else (or Einstein himself) put two and two together after the fact…well, it certainly happened by the 1920s.

The reason I bring this up right now, is that it ties to the first issue with nuclear electrons. Ny Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, an electron bouncing around in something as tiny as a nucleus must have a kinetic energy of at least 40 MeV (its position is very well defined, its momentum therefore isn’t going to be anywhere close to zero). Not only is this a lot more than the energy of beta radiation (presumed to be one of these electrons escaping the nucleus), it’s more than the binding energy of the protons; one bound electron bouncing around in there contains enough energy to kick five or six protons out of a nucleus! And what would keep it from flying out as super-energetic beta radiation?

Issue #2: Spin

Probing into quantum mechanics eventually established that protons and electrons have a spin of 1/2. Or, alternatively, -1/2.

But the term “spin” is misleading. The particles don’t actually spin like a top. They do something else that’s pretty whacky and has no sensible referent in day to day life. Nuclear and particle physicists will hijack an everyday term to describe these phenomena, however, so they speak of “spin.” They picked this word because it is measured in the same units as angular momentum. The actual value is 1/2 of ℏ, so the physicists simply label it “1/2.” It can point in two opposite directions, so the “other” direction is labeled -1/2.

If you have some even number of electrons or protons, they could be any combination of 1/2 and -1/2 spins, but since there is an even number of them, you can pair particles with 1/2 spin with particles of -1/2 spin, cancelling each other out, and some even number of particles will be an excess of 1/2 spin (or -1/2) spin particles. The excess will always be an integer, if there is no excess the total spin is zero–which is also an integer. (In practice, the + and – 1/2 spins will cancel each other as much as possible, in this case leaving a total spin of zero.)

An odd number, n of electrons or protons will always have 1/2 or -1/2 spin left over, on top of the integer spin that the even number n-1 of the particles will give.

So let us consider the nitrogen-14 nucleus (Z=7, A=14). It should have 14 protons and 7 electrons in it, which total to 21. Thus if the spin is measured, the net spin should have a 1/2 (or -1/2) fraction in it.

They did measure the spin of nitrogen-14 nuclei, and it always came out to integer spins. So there have to be an even number of protons plus electrons in that nucleus.

Therein lies an apparent contradiction, and there are no actual contradictions in reality; there must be some unknown fact or bad assumption that when identified, will resolve the apparent contradiction.

The Nuclear Force

I’ve described two issues with the concept of nuclear electrons. But I kind of skated past something in my discussion of binding energy. As I said, you are bound to the earth by gravity. Electrons are bound to atoms by the electromagnetic force. Protons are bound to a nucleus by…anyone? Anyone?

Clearly there’s some other force out there. A force strong enough to overpower the eighty newtons of force between adjacent protons. But weak enough that we’d otherwise never have noticed it–because we hadn’t noticed it. It should have been about as conspicuous as AOC in front of a TV camera, yet we never noticed it.

It seems odd to postulate a force that’s very strong at close quarters, yet unnoticeable at a distance. If were anything like electromagnetism or gravity, it should drop off as the square of the distance…twice as far away, you feel 1/4th the force, three times as far away, you feel 1/9th of the force. So if this hypothetical force is an attractive force stronger than the electromagnetic repulsion at some distance, it ought to still be stronger than the electromagnetic force twice as far away–both forces are a quarter as strong at that location as they were before, so the one that was larger before, should still be larger here.

But we all know of something that doesn’t behave that way, and that is magnets. Sure, one pole of a magnet has a force that drops off as the square of the distance, but there’s always a nearby opposite pole. If you’re right up against a north pole, the south pole of that magnet is, say ten times further away, and only cancels out 1/100th of the force. But double your distance from the north pole, and now the south pole is about five times further away and cancels out 1/25th of the force, as you move further and further away the two poles are (propotionally) closer to being the same distance away from you and cancel each other out quickly.

So magnetic forces appear to drop off as the cube of the distance from the magnet.

In order to match what we see, this hypothetical force should be almost nothing at 2.5 femtometers’ distance, strongly attractive at about 1 femtometer, and actually be repulsive at distances less than 0.7 femtometers. In other words, two protons would have to be almost touching for this force to become a factor.

The repulsion at very close distances actually puts a lower bound on the size of nuclei, since the protons can’t get closer than that without being pushed apart. That’s the effective size of a proton. And indeed these distances are roughly the size of a proton.

This force turns out to be very, very complex computationally, but it was consistent with everything they saw at the time, so, just like gravitational and electromagnetic forces, it was accepted as being true even if a lot of details needed to be ironed out. (And even though we know a lot more about it today (1920s physicists had no idea), there are still issues.)

Enter: the Neutron

I mentioned that even though Rutherford had originally suggested the nuclear electron, he grew dissatisfied with it for many of the reasons already mentioned, and a year later, in 1920, had come up with another idea. Perhaps, instead of proton/electron pairs, the extra, dead-weight mass of a nucleus that doesn’t contribute to its electrical charge was due to a neutral single particle about the mass of a proton. He even gave it a name, the neutron. This rather neatly solved the spin issue: If a nitrogen-14 nucleus contained 7 protons and 7 neutrons, the spins would add to zero. Repulsive forces would still be about the same, though: too much without positing a “nuclear force.”

But most physicists didn’t accept this conjecture. Though it solved a lot of the issues that the nuclear electron hypothesis introduced, physicists weren’t going to accept that this “neutron” thingie existed until someone actually detected one. Throughout the entire decade of the 1920s, most physicists continued to accept the nuclear electron hypothesis as being likeliest to be true, despite all the problems it seemed to raise.

If it seemed like this attitude was inconsistent with their fairly ready acceptance of the nuclear force, well…no. A force is intangible, but you can see its effects. You write some equations to build a model of how the force works, and if all of the effects match, you’ve probably got a good description of a real force, at least until you learn more. But if you posit a particle, you’ve posited something tangible that you should be able to detect in a much more direct way. And so far, the neutron had not been.

So we need to detect a neutron. But how? Protons and electrons are easy to detect, and relatively easy to manipulate, because they had electrical charges. One could see the effect of the electrostatic force, both caused by the particles, and also the effect of the force on the particles…in particular being able to deflect them to measure their mass, but also to accelerate them, like happened to electrons in a Crookes tube.

A totally neutral particle would be invisible based on these methods of detection…and impervious to being manipulated by electromagnetism.

But the first crack in this problem appeared in 1930. Walter Bothe and Herbert Becker, in Giessen, Germany, were using alpha particles from polonium (Z=94) in an experiment. They picked polonium because it spits out particularly energetic alpha particles (in other words, the alpha particles are moving faster than usual), and they wanted those energetic particles to use as a hammer on light elements, like beryllium (Z=4), boron (Z=5), and lithium (Z=3). When the alpha particles hit these light nuclei, an unusually penetrating radiation was produced. It couldn’t be deflected, so they tentatively concluded that these were very strong gamma rays. But it was hard to interpret the results definitively.Two years later, in Paris, Irene Joliot-Curie (the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie) and her husband Frederic Joliot sicced this radiation on paraffin, a compound of carbon and hydrogen. It resulted in protons being ejected from the sample; the protons had kinetic energy of 5 MeV. This radiation, if it were gamma rays, would have to be 50MeV gamma rays, much stronger than anything seen to date.

Ettore Majorana, a young physicist in Rome, analyzed all this data and announced his conclusion: This radiation had to consist of neutral particles.

When Rutherford, and his Cavendish laboratories colleague James Chadwick had heard about the Paris experiments and they, too didn’t believe this radiation was any kind of gamma ray. Chadwick devised a bunch of experiments to prove it wasn’t gamma radiation, then went on to subject more materials to the mystery rays, and eventually demonstrated that whatever it was, it consisted of neutral particles about the mass of a proton.

In other words, Chadwick had found Rutherford’s neutron.

Now that the neutron had been found…whoosh!!! the nuclear electron hypothesis was discarded; the notion that a nucleus contained protons and (except for hydrogen-1) neutrons now made a lot of sense and we could be sure that neutrons actually existed rather than being a convenient shorthand.

Back to Binding Energy and the Nuclear Force

With the correct understanding of a nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons, things become a bit clearer. In many ways these particles are a lot alike, and collectively, they’re called nucleons. They are of almost identical mass, and both are subject to the nuclear force.

The mass number (A) of an isotope is now understood to be how many nucleons it contains. Atomic number (Z) is now strictly equal to the number of protons in the nucleus, since we no longer have additional protons masked by nuclear electrons. We now have a new number N, the number of neutrons, and N + Z = A.

Nucleons are bound together by the nuclear force, which is very short range, its maximum strength basically covers the distance from one nucleon to the next.

So picture a nucleus with (say) about sixty nucleons in it. A nucleon near the center of the nucleus is completely surrouned by other nucleons and they each exert a strong attractive force on it; the forces balance, that nucleon is pretty happy where it is. But note, this nucleon does not feel any attraction from a nucleon that is two nucleons away, rather than adjacent.

Nucleons near the surface of the nucleus only experience about half as much nuclear force, because they’re not surrounded by nucleons, they just see a few to one side of them…and again, no effect from the nucleons further away.

A very small nucleus, say carbon-12, has a large percentage of its nucleons at the surface of the nucleus, maybe a handful in the center are surrounded by other nucleons. This means that the average nuclear force on a nucleon is less than it is in larger nuclei, where most of the nucleons are surrounded by other nucleons.

Now, going to a very large nucleus, like that of uranium-238, the vast majority of nucleons are surrounded and thus tightly bound. But those near the surface, just like those on the surface of carbon-12, feel half of the nuclear force attraction. But the protons there actually feel more electrical repulsion, because that force is long range and there are a lot of other protons in that nucleus, all pushing them away. So that particular nucleus is teetering on the edge of falling apart. Indeed, given a few billion years, it will fall apart.

This is sort of a hand-wavy argument that the most stable nuclei are the medium size ones; ones where a large number of nucleons are completely surrounded (maximizing the attractive force they feel) but also where ones near the surface don’t get repelled by so many distant nucleons. Either side of that happy middle ground, the average nucleon either just feels less attractive force (smaller nuclei, fewer near neighbors on average to attract), or feels more repulsive electromagnetic force (larger nuclei, lots of protons repelling the nucleon).

The total nuclear binding energy of a nucleus can be plotted versus the number of nucleons; when you do this you get a diagonal line, down to the lower left, up to the upper right. It’s almost a straight line, but if you look closely, there’s a slight bend to it. (I’d show you but I can’t find that plot on line…and it’s not nearly as illuminating as the one I’m about to describe.)

If you then go through and plot the average binding energy per nucleon, you now get a very striking curve, like this:

Now you can see that at about 56 nucleons, the binding energy per nucleon is highest; it takes more to pull one of those nuclei apart than any other nucleus. There’s a huge jump from hydrogen-1 (zero binding energy) to helium-4 (alpha particle).

Conversely, if you can build up to iron-56, you can release about 8 1/2 MeV per nucleon, which is a huge amount of energy. You can get most of that just going from hydrogen to helium-4.

Alternatively, if you can pull nucleons away from uranium-238, you can release about 1 MeV for each nucleon by the time you bring it down to iron-56. Uranium will actually help you get started on this by undergoing five alpha decays spontaneously as it decays to lead.

This was to have explosive implications. Quite literally.

But in the meantime, in 1920 Arthur Eddington–the same astronomer/physicist/mathematician who had measured the sun’s bending of the light from distant stars to prove general relativity correct just the year before–put forward the suggestion that perhaps this is what powered the stars…specifically the fusion of hydrogen into helium-4. In 1928 George Gamow did a lot of the math to figure out just what it would take to get this to happen. But hydrogen wasn’t thought to be any more common on stars than it is on earth. (The earth as a whole has little hydrogen in it; we think it’s common because there’s a lot of water up here on the surface). Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin had, in her doctoral thesis in 1925, proposed that the sun was mostly hydrogen, but this was largely ignored because the prevailing theory was that the sun’s composition was similar to that of the earth. Eventually she was proved right, and Eddington, too was proved right. Most of the energy of stars does indeed come from hydrogen fusion; the rest comes from fusion of helium and heavier nuclei, releasing 7 MeV per nucleon. Further fusion happens in heavier stars to get that last 1 1/2 MeV / nucleon out of the “stuff” stars are made of. I discuss this in my older articles on stars, and we’ll be coming back to this in a future installation of this series.

[Semi-personal note: Gamow spent the last part of his career, 1956-1968, at the University of Colorado in Boulder (a/k/a “Berkeley by the Mountains”). This tower (physics faculty offices, one of the two or three tallest structures on the main campus with eight floors)…

…is named after him. (The physics lecture halls and labs are in the building at the bottom, and it looks like the picture was taken from a similar looking tower within which a lot of work is done for NASA–perhaps including the New Horizons probe that visited Pluto. I would cut through these buildings often going from one end of the campus to the other, particularly in bad weather. Football stadium in the background.)

The Neutron Hammer

Imagine that you are a lone proton, a/k/a an H⁺ ion, and you are headed directly towards, say, a carbon-12 nucleus. As you approach, you are slowed down by the repulsion of the six positively charged protons in that nucleus. If you aren’t moving very fast, you will eventually stop and be pushed away. If you are moving quite fast, you will get very close to that nucleus before stopping. If you are moving fast enough, you’ll manage to get close enough that suddenly, you’ll feel the nuclear force and now you’re caught–you just became part of a nitrogen-13 nucleus (which, by the way, is unstable and will want to decay–but not by either of the radioactive decay modes known so far).

Now imagine you are a neutron. You don’t feel any force at all, either repulsive or attractive, until just before impact, you feel the nuclear force, and now you’re caught like a fly on flypaper…you are now part of a carbon-13 nucleus (which is stable).

If you are a scientist looking to hit atomic nuclei with things, do you see that it might be fairly easy to hit nuclei with neutrons? Both protons and neutrons need to hit almost head on, but at least the neutron doesn’t need to be given a good hard shove just to get past the electrostatic repulsion.

Suddenly, it became very easy to take some perfectly ordinary, stable nucleus, like, for instance, calcium-42 (Z=20, A=42) and hit it with neutrons to make Ca-43, Ca-44 and so on. Eventually, you’ll get to a nucleus that’s unstable, Ca-45, which will beta decay to scandium-45 (Z=21, A=44).

There’s no calcium-45 found in nature on earth. It has to be made in a laboratory. But by irradiating various things with neutrons, isotopes like this, and literally thousands of others, were discovered, and their radioactivity studied. It turns out that every isotope that beta-decays releases a characteristic amount of energy when it beta decays, and usually the half lives are fairly short (days or years at most).

(Occasionally it turns out the half life is ridiculously long–quintillions of years, trillions of times the age of the universe, and it’s very hard to even tell that that isotope is radioactive. Only fairly recently, in fact, has it been proved that bismuth 209 (Z-83) is actually radioactive with a half life of 20 quintillion years; it had been considered a stable element, the heaviest one in fact, before then.)

In fact, you can turn this around. If you have a sample of unknown composition that has a lot of beta decay going on in it, you can measure the beta decay energy (or energies) and get a good idea what’s in the sample.

Which is well and good, but in most cases, your unknown sample will not consist of a bunch of these short-lived beta-decaying isotopes. They don’t exist in nature, unless they’re part of a uranium or thorium decay chain.

There’s a way around this. You can expose your sample to a strong beam of neutrons. Some of the atoms in it will capture the neutrons, become unstable isotopes, and reveal what they are. For instance, if you irradiate a sample with neutrons, and then detect Ca-45 decays, you know the sample must have a lot of Ca-44 in it (some of which captured neutrons and became Ca-45). Only a vanishingly tiny fraction of the atoms are altered by this treatment, but you do have the issue of your sample being radioactive for a while after the analysis is performed. This technique is effectively non-destructive since only a small fraction of the nuclei end up moving to the right one on the periodic table, and does see use, it’s called “Neutron Activation Analysis” (the neutrons are deemed to “activate” the nuclei by making them radioactive).

Neutron activation analysis will not tell you about what molecules a sample is made of, only what elements. So, for instance, if it detects some small amount of lead in a rock, you can’t know which ore of lead it is (though you might be able to infer it from what else is in the sample). An atom’s being in or out of a molecule has no effect on its radioactivity, which is what this analysis looks at.

Conclusion

The nuclear force is, today, considered the force that governs alpha decay, as well as nuclear fusion. As well as nuclear fission, but that had not been discovered yet. The neutron was going to be a very useful tool for nuclear physicists, and only thirteen years after it was discovered, the world would be slapped across the face with the realization that it had very practical applications as well.

We can cross a few 1894 mysteries off our list. But we have a new one to take their places.

If there are no electrons in the nucleus, what the heck is up with beta decay? Where does that zippy little beta particle, i.e., electron, come from?

Plus the mystery of the current age: Who the hell actually intentionally voted for Biden?

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!