“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.
Mid-Independence Day
Yesterday was the Second, and tomorrow is the Fourth, of July.
Although the Declaration of Independence proudly proclaims “In Congress, July 4th, 1776,” the actual resolution of independence, the Lee Resolution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Resolution ) was passed on July 2nd.
July 4th was when the text of the masterfully-written-and-butchered document was approved. It includes the Lee Resolution in its own text, in the last paragraph:
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Declaration of Independence of the United States, last paragraph; Lee Resolution in bold.
So in a sense Friday was the real Independence Day, and today is just the average of the real one, and the commonly celebrated one on Sunday.
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.
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
Wolf’s Pub is open! Come on in and sit right down. It’s going to be wild today. Moonshine is on the drink menu. I have no clue where it came from, but the bartenders assure me it is delish. We’ll get to that in a moment.
Is it just me or is the ride getting wilder and bumpier by the week? Things are coming to a point.
The Hedge Funds are digging in. The Ape Army is standing firm. Wall Street trembles in its corpulent and jiggly corruption. The middle class is on to their game and beginning to beat them at it. See here and here.
“Our entire economy is now, in large part, rigged, as it has been moved further away from free-market capitalism to a cronyism nightmare where central planners and big companies work together to consolidate power. They scratch each other’s backs and ultimately tie up loose ends that get in their way of rolling up money and control. Small businesses and small individuals, which make up the backbone of the economy and stand for economic freedom, have been both passively and intentionally targeted.”
The state AUDIT(S) are shaking the foundation of the bureaucratic administrative state. We are seeing the underbelly of a nation that is being run by usurpers. And the Supreme Court did something right yesterday.
The intelligence arm of the administrative state is in a tizzy. What worked before ain’t working so well now. The false flag events, the “suicides,” the armed conflicts that make their masters wealthy and powerful.
Yeah, the proverbial matrix is glitching like a meth head in need of a pipe hit.
Our corrupted government officials (see here for all the oath-breakers) are running for cover. They are full of bluster, but bluster ain’t gonna help them in the end.
That dirty wench, Liz Cheney, is trying to torch the house before she gets thrown out by the good people of Wyoming. Low rent individual.
The C-C-P is watching its plan of global dominance begin to unravel. They have their fingers in every economic, academic, and governmental pie they can. What greed! What hubris! The Covid bioweapon they released upon humanity seems to be boomeranging, though.
It’s all coming out. They can’t stop the hemorrhaging of truth.
What is the Davos crowd to do?
Thankfully the commies don’t understand Scriptural truth: Pride goes before a fall.
America is waking up. The REAL AMERICA. The beautiful nation upon which the torch of freedom has been held aloft for over two centuries.
We’ve been infiltrated from outside and betrayed from inside, but this is nothing new. This is that ancient, age-old battle between good and evil.
Let us turn briefly to 1945 and a grown-up “fairy story” that C. S. Lewis published just as WW2 had ended.
The Book is That Hideous Strength and it is the third (but a stand-alone) book in his Space Trilogy. To be honest, I have read the first two books several times, but That Hideous Strength I have read countless times.
In short, an insidious organization, the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) has set up shop in a small English town rumored to be the resting place of the Arthurian character, Merlin. The N.I.C.E. sets up a fusion of state and science and academia. In short, fascism.
Their plans for mankind are such that you and I can actually see them taking shape in 2021 with different characters, institutions, and nations. Their methods are exactly what we see happening today. For instance:
“But every advance in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work-people who are required. A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a dead-weight. The real importance of scientific war is that scientists have to be reserved. It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself. You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy.”
Next, let’s visit the age-old methods of imposing such things on the population. Fairy Hardcastle, a dyke police chief, could be detailing the crap we go through on a daily basis with our UniParty. Never forget, it is RINOs like Liz Cheney who have played us over and over for many decades:
“Both, honey, both,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us—to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”
(Fairy Hardcastle, That Hideous Strength, 1945)
HELL MOUTH
We can’t forget the Covid plandemic. The precipitating event for taking away our Constitutional rights was followed up with BLM/Antifa riots and the FAKE INSURRECTION PLOT, with which even now Nancy Pelosi–that miniHell Mouth–is conniving to harm us. Here’s how Lewis describes the process:
“Emergency regulations,” said Feverstone. “You’ll never get the powers we want at Edgestow until the Government declares that a state of emergency exists there.”
“Exactly,” said Filostrato. “It is folly to talk of peaceful revolutions. Not that the canaglia would always resist—often they have to be prodded into it—but until there is the disturbance, the firing, the barricades—no one gets powers to act effectively. There is not enough what you call weight on the boat to steer him.”
(That Hideous Strength, 1945)
Isn’t it clear as a bell that Pelosi, McConnell and now we hear possibly Pence, connived to take out President Trump and his followers with the FAKED INSURRECTION?
“The Party’s foreign propaganda is more sophisticated, and chillingly effective. Leveraging Western elites’ weakness and gullibility, plus the vulnerability of open societies, the CCP’s massive overseas propaganda campaigns can be delineated into four general categories: disinformation, elite capture, coerced self-censorship, and brainwashing….But elite capture goes further. Former senior government officials, including cabinet-level figures, routinely defend the CCP’s murderous acts, including the Tiananmen Massacre and other egregious human rights violations. Some of these former officials have even become registered agents for the Beijing regime and its CCP-controlled business interests in the U.S. Many of our leading universities and their talented professors often are coopted by the CCP to voice Beijing’s views in the U.S., masqueraded as research and objective surveys.”
MOONSHINE
I think it’s time for a libation, and moonshine it is! Now, moonshine has a storied history in our nation. While it is mostly known through Prohibition, moonshine was often made in colonial times, too. And even President Washington had the Whiskey Rebellion because citizens were not happy having to pay an excise tax on whiskey, which incidentally, President Jefferson repealed in 1802.
Here’s a couple articles about moonshine here and here. That second link has some mighty fine-looking hillbilly stills. Now, moonshine is pretty much legal nowadays, but you might want to check your state just to make sure. It sure is sold in the stores!
A nice video here on making moonshine at home:
And here’s one for Apple Pie Moonshine. Watch the he-man have to explain himself. LOL.
Of course, no mention of moonshine is complete without some good country music…about moonshine:
HOUSE RULES
Now, we all know that moonshine is high octane, so we have to keep ourselves together and not get too wild. Before indulging, let’s review the House Rules here.
Anyone who begins howling before sundown will be sent to the Utree to sober up. It’s also the place to reconvene, if needed.
A BIT MORE ON LEWIS
That quote at the top of the opener is also quoted on the title page of That Hideous Strength.
Here is more of that stanza:
“That when the sun is at the hicht,
At noon, when it doth shine maist bricht,
The shadow of that hideous strength
Sax mile and mair it is of length:
Thus may ye judge into your thoucht,
Gif Babylon be heich or nocht.”
The spelling is of course not modern English, and also differs from the version that Lewis quotes, but one can get an idea of the devilish strength of the Tower of Babel. Lewis described his story thus:
“This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious “point” which I have tried to make in my “Abolition of Man.” In the story, the outer rim of that devilry, had to be shown touching the life of some ordinary and respectable profession.”
He chose academia because it was what he knew. I take something from that. Academia, the lifeblood of the intellectual life of a nation, once corrupted can spawn evil of the magnitude of a Tower of Babel. When politicians and business are added into the equation, the world is then bending under the weight of the kind of evil we only think of in fairy stories.
Well, our fairy story is real. And Lewis knew that fairy stories are often more true than not.
EU Parliament Building
Take, for instance, the design of the European Union’s Parliament building. Often called the Louise Weiss Building (there’s a plaque on the building dedicated to this feminist who worked for the union of Europe) it is remarkably similar to a painting of the tower by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in 1563:
Hmmmm….
The poster below is from a site Now the End Begins, which also writes about the similarities. Not saying I agree with everything there, but it’s interesting.
When you look at the poster (which apparently was a promotional poster for the EU), it is interesting to note the way the people are drawn. Very dehumanizing.
Also, here’s a little look at the inside of the parliament building. Very reminiscent of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, eh?
Inside the EU Parliament building
C. S. Lewis knew well the old evil that has bedeviled man since the beginning. It does not change. It is ever the same, though it wears “updated” garments as the centuries pass. You should read about the moment when one character experiences his own damnation in THS. It’s one of the most chilling literary passages I’ve ever read.
We may be in a monumental struggle, but Christendom fights best when on the ropes. We finally drop to our knees and call on the Lord, who fights for us (Ex. 14:14). I can’t tell you how grateful I am for all of you here who drop prayers (Duchess for sure!), speak their faith, and help each other when we’re down.
I love DePat’s addition of the St. Michael Prayer. May I add one? The Guardian Angel prayer. It is so very comforting and strengthening:
Angel of God, my guardian dear,
To whom God’s love commits me here,
Ever this day (night) be at my side,
To light and guard, rule and guide. Amen
ODDS AND ENDS
If you listen to only one podcast this fine day, listen to this one: Gen. Flynn, Gen. McInerny, Major Gen. Arbuckle, and Col. Lawrence Sellin are deadly serious about the infiltration and betrayal of our country by communists within and without.
Independence Day is coming up. Have you seen Flag Shirts? Ima gonna get me one.
Hey, I got an email from Hillsdale College with a free six-week study on the Constitution, beginning July 13. Here’s the link to sign up: Constitution 101
I used to think radical scoundrel Eric Holder was the most criminal Attorney General this nation ever had, but now I believe that honor goes to the man who single-handedly erased Donald Trump’s second term – William Barr. ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And I want you all …
It’s time to start going after the bad guys. No – not with VIOLENCE. WITH THE SWORDS OF TRUTH.
To not just CHEER ON Trump, but to FOLLOW HIS LEAD.
To create an ENVIRONMENT of YEARNING FOR JUSTICE that will make it THINKABLE.
SO – with this in mind…..
What I want to do now is collect the MUG SHOTS of all who, upon reflection, are the OATHBREAKERS deserving of JUSTICE – when we get it back someday.
Just a simple collection, to be REMEMBERED when JUSTICE is finally POSSIBLE.
Do you believe in justice? Do you believe it will come?
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It is also a place to read, post and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name calling, ridicule, insults, baiting and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For we do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. 13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
14 Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15 and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; 16 above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. 17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God; 18 praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints—
Ephesians 6:12 clearly indicates that the conflict with Satan is spiritual, and so no tangible weapons can be effectively employed against him and his minions. We are not given a list of specific tactics Satan will use. However, the passage is quite clear that when we follow all the instructions faithfully, we will be able to stand, and we will have victory regardless of Satan’s strategy.
The first element of our armor is truth (verse 14). This is easy to understand, since Satan is said to be the “father of lies” (John 8:44). Deception is high on the list of things God considers to be an abomination. A “lying tongue” is one of the things He describes as “detestable to Him” (Proverbs 6:16-17). We are exhorted to put on truth for our own sanctification and deliverance, as well as for the benefit of those to whom we witness.
Also in verse 14, we are told to put on the breastplate of righteousness. This righteousness is not works of righteousness done by men. Rather, this is the righteousness of Christ, imputed by God and received by faith, which guards our hearts against the accusations and charges of Satan and secures our innermost being from his attacks.
Verse 15 speaks of the preparation of the feet for spiritual conflict. In warfare, sometimes an enemy places dangerous obstacles in the path of soldiers. The idea of the preparation of the gospel of peace as footwear suggest there will be traps. Satan has many obstacles placed in the path to halt the propagation of the gospel.
The shield of faith spoken of in verse 16 makes Satan’s sowing of doubt about the faithfulness of God and His Word ineffective. Our faith—of which Christ is “the author and perfecter” (Hebrews 12:2)— is like a golden shield, precious, solid, and substantial.
The helmet of salvation in verse 17 is protection for the head. We could say that our way of thinking needs preservation. The head is the seat of the mind, which, when it has laid hold of the sure gospel hope of eternal life, will not receive false doctrine or give way to Satan’s temptations. The unsaved person has no hope of warding off the blows of false doctrine because he is without the helmet of salvation and his mind is incapable of discerning between spiritual truth and spiritual deception.
Verse 17 interprets itself as to the meaning of the sword of the Spirit—it is the Word of God. While all the other pieces of spiritual armor are defensive in nature, the sword of the Spirit is the only offensive weapon in the armor of God. It speaks of the holiness and power of the Word of God. A greater spiritual weapon is not conceivable. In Jesus’ temptations in the desert, the Word of God was always His overpowering response to Satan. What a blessing that the same Word is available to us!
In verse 18, we are told to pray in the Spirit (that is, with the mind of Christ, with His heart and His priorities) in addition to wearing the full armor of God. We cannot neglect prayer, as it is the means by which we draw spiritual strength from God. Without prayer, without reliance upon God, our efforts at spiritual warfare are empty and futile. The full armor of God—truth, righteousness, the gospel, faith, salvation, the Word of God, and prayer—are the tools God has given us, through which we can be spiritually victorious, overcoming Satan’s attacks and temptations.
There are two primary errors when it comes to spiritual warfare—over-emphasis and under-emphasis. Some blame every sin, every conflict, and every problem on demons that need to be cast out. Others completely ignore the spiritual realm and the fact that the Bible tells us our battle is against spiritual powers. The key to successful spiritual warfare is finding the biblical balance. Jesus sometimes cast demons out of people; other times He healed people with no mention of the demonic. The apostle Paul instructs Christians to wage war against the sin in themselves (Romans 6) and warns us to oppose the schemes of the devil (Ephesians 6:10–18).
Ephesians 6:10–12 says, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” This text teaches some crucial truths: we can only stand strong in the Lord’s power, it is God’s armor that protects us, and our battle is ultimately against spiritual forces of evil in the world.
Ephesians 6:13–18 is a description of the spiritual armor God gives us. We are to stand firm with the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit, and by praying in the Spirit. What do these pieces of spiritual armor represent in spiritual warfare? We are to know the truth, believe the truth, and speak the truth. We are to rest in the fact that we are declared righteous because of Christ’s sacrifice for us. We are to proclaim the gospel no matter how much resistance we face. We are not to waver in our faith, trusting God’s promises no matter how strongly we are attacked. Our ultimate defense is the assurance we have of our salvation, an assurance that no spiritual force can take away. Our offensive weapon is the Word of God, not our own opinions and feelings. And we are to pray in the power and will of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is our ultimate example of resisting temptation in spiritual warfare. Observe how Jesus handled direct attacks from Satan when He was tempted in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11). Each temptation was combatted with the words “it is written.” The Word of the living God is the most powerful weapon against the temptations of the devil. “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11).
A word of caution concerning spiritual warfare is in order. The name of Jesus is not a magic incantation that causes demons to flee from before us. The seven sons of Sceva are an example of what can happen when people presume an authority they have not been given (Acts 19:13–16). Even Michael the archangel did not rebuke Satan in his own power but said, “The Lord rebuke you!” (Jude 1:9). When we start talking to the devil, we run the risk of being led astray as Eve was (Genesis 3:1–7). Our focus should be on God, not demons; we speak to Him, not them.
In summary, what are the keys to success in spiritual warfare? We rely on God’s power, not our own. We put on the whole armor of God. We draw on the power of Scripture—the Word of God is the Spirit’s sword. We pray in perseverance and holiness, making our appeal to God. We stand firm (Ephesians 6:13–14); we submit to God; we resist the devil’s work (James 4:7), knowing that the Lord of hosts is our protector. “Truly he is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken” (Psalm 62:2).
God is in Control . . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . . Keep Looking Up
Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn nor weep.” . . . “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Over the past four years, President Donald Trump’s administration delivered for Americans of all backgrounds like never before. Save America is about building on those accomplishments, supporting the brave conservatives who will define the future of the America First Movement, the future of our party, and the future of our beloved country. Save America is also about ensuring that we always keep America First, in our foreign and domestic policy. We take pride in our country, we teach the truth about our history, we celebrate our rich heritage and national traditions, and of course, we respect our great American Flag.
We are committed to defending innocent life and to upholding the Judeo-Christian values of our founding.
We believe in the promise of the Declaration of Independence, that we are all made EQUAL by our Creator, and that must all be TREATED equal under the law.
We know that our rights do not come from government, they come from God, and no earthly force can ever take those rights away. That includes the right to religious liberty and the right to Keep and Bear Arms.
We believe in rebuilding our previously depleted military and ending the endless wars our failed politicians of the past got us into for decades.
We embrace free thought, we welcome robust debate, and we are not afraid to stand up to the oppressive dictates of political correctness.
We know that the rule of law is the ultimate safeguard of our freedoms, and we affirm that the Constitution means exactly what it says AS WRITTEN.
We support fair trade, low taxes, and fewer job-killing regulations, and we know that America must always have the most powerful military on the face of the Earth.
We believe in Law and Order, and we believe that the men and women of law enforcement are HEROES who deserve our absolute support.
We believe in FREE SPEECH and Fair Elections. We must ensure fair, honest, transparent, and secure elections going forward – where every LEGAL VOTE counts.
Some say the village was named after William Welling, a local resident, while others believe the name is derived from the title of the Duke of Wellington.[4]
Wellington was incorporated as a village in 1855.[5]
In 1858, the former American House Hotel (later torn down and replaced by Herrick Memorial Library) was the site of the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. A group of men, both white and black and many from Oberlin, swarmed the hotel to rescue runaway slave John Price. He was being held by a US Marshal and his men, who intended to return him to his master in Kentucky.
The abolitionists transported Price out of town en route to the Underground Railroad and helped convey him to Canada. Thirty-seven men were indicted, but only two, Simeon M. Bushnell and Charles Henry Langston, were tried in federal court for interfering with the marshal in carrying out the Fugitive Slave Law. After Langston’s eloquent speech about slavery and discrimination, the judge gave them light sentences. The events and trial received national attention, and kept the issue of slavery at the forefront of debate.
Archibald M. Willard, painter of the patriotic Spirit of ’76 painting, lived in Wellington during the 19th century. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery on the outskirts of the village. The Spirit of ’76 Museum,[6] also located in Wellington, is dedicated to Willard and the history of Wellington. The original drum and fife used as models in the painting are also on display.
On New Year’s Day, 1951, two eleven-year-old boys, Gerald Kordelsky and William Flood, accidentally drowned in an abandoned well at Chismar Farm in Wellington.[7]
In 2010, Wellington was named the “Best Old House Neighborhood” for the state of Ohio by This Old House Magazine in their annual feature article.[8]
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).
The net result of the last week is mostly stability. Rhodium did dip below $19K but has blipped back up over it. (EDITED: these numbers were wrong until about 0330 Saturday, because I forgot to edit them.)
The Endgame for Classical Physics
Introduction
Physics before 1900 is known as “Classical Physics.” It still works as well as we used to think it did–provided you are working on every day scales. Go very small, very fast, or very massive and you discover that classical physics is an approximation very close to the truth for things that aren’t very small, very fast, or very massive, so very close that one can practically ignore the difference.
What happened around 1900? We started investigating things outside that zone.
Our daily lives exist in that zone though some of our tech goes into places where non-classical physics must be accounted for. In fact no semiconductor would work if modern physics weren’t true, and you wouldn’t be reading these words because no dead-tree leftist gatekeeper publisher would have me.
Yes. This is the day. This is the day we don’t stop at 1895.
But first…
Go Back: Avogadro’s Number
I made the claim that no one had any idea as to the size of Avogadro’s number before 1895. As a reminder, this is the number of molecules of some compound with an “atomic weight” of X, in an X gram sample of it, or almost equivalently, the number of atomic mass units in a gram. Taking oxygen as an example, it forms a two-atom molecule, O2 whose atomic mass by definition was 32 atomic mass units. How many O2 molecules in 32 grams? The answer to that, whatever it is, is Avogadro’s number.
It turns out that in 1865 Josef Loschmidt was able to make an argument about at least the approximate size of atoms and how far apart they had to be in comparison for a gas to behave as a gas and was somehow able to figure out how many molecules of a gas were in one liter of it, at standard temperature and pressure.
But since we already know that 22.4 liters of gas under the same conditions is one mole, so simply multiplying Loschmidt’s number by 22.4 gives you Avogadro’s number, the number of molecules of anything in a mole of that thing.
The modern value of Loschmidt’s number is 2.6867811(15)×1025 per cubic meter, but there are a thousand liters in a cubic meter, so 2.687×1022 works well enough for our purposes.
Apparently Loschmidt himself didn’t go all the way through the reasoning to get the number, it was left to people like James Clerk Maxwell (whose name had better sound familiar by now) to cite a figure of “about 19 million million million” per cm3, or 1.9×1025 m-3. Which is a bit over 29% too low, but really, given that we had no way of directly measuring it before then, was pretty good.
So contrary to what I said, we did have some idea what Avogadro’s number was.
Today, the mole is one of the seven fundamental units of the SI (metric system) and is defined to be precisely 6.02214076×1023 particles (i.e., roughly 22.4 times Loschmidt’s number. If it should turn out that that many atoms of (say) atomic mass 12 doesn’t quite mass 12 grams, tough. (We know it’s pretty doggone close though, so high school chemistry lab can ignore the difference. Besides the proportions will be right even if NA isn’t quite where it “should” be.)
OK, that’s out of the way.
The Crookes Tube
Today there are actually four…well, three and a half…stories to be told, and the Crookes tube is tied up in two of them.
What is a Crookes tube? Well, it’s sort of like the “cathode ray tube” no one uses for televisions and computer monitors any more. Or any of a host of other vacuum tubes.
It was first created sometime before 1869, and it was a geek toy par excellence. Take a large, oblong glass tube, run two conductors into it, one near each end. Seal it off and pump almost all of the air out. I’d guess they pumped as much air as they could out of it, but couldn’t get the last millionth out of it. As it turns out it won’t work if it’s a total vacuum.
Now put a ten thousand volt potential between the two conductors. The one hooked up to positive is called the anode, the negative one is the cathode.
You get an eerie green glow on the end of the tube that’s behind the anode.
Now that was interesting, what was going on here? There wasn’t any current flowing. So physicists started tinkering. By putting a cutout of a Maltese cross near the anode (done by Julius Pluecker in 1869) and noting that the green glowing part of the glass had Maltese cross-shaped “shadow” in it, it was proved that whatever it was was traveling in a straight line away from the anode and past the cathode, and some of the “rays” were being blocked by the Maltese cross. (And nowadays any time someone draws a diagram of a Crookes tube in action, they always show it with a Maltese cross; and even the one demoed in the picture below uses it; it’s some sort of cliche now.)
Crookes tube, and in the dark.
The straight line travel and the fact that glows like this (“fluorescence”) were thus far known to only be caused by ultraviolet light, led some to conclude that these rays were electromagnetic in nature. Others thought that the rays might just be charged atoms.
In 1876 Eugen Goldstein experimented with different shapes of cathode, (a point, a flat surface he could tilt, and so on) and was able to prove that the rays behaved like charged particles. Some sort of electromagnetism would leave every point on the surface going in every direction (which is why you see the whole light bulb not just the point that faces you full on), but if the cathode were a flat surface the rays would all come out perpendicular to the surface, as if they were particles repelled by that surface. Of course, it’s a negatively charged surface, so the particles repelled by it would be negatively charged.
Goldstein gave them the name “cathode rays.”
Heinrich Hertz, who, you’ll remember, discovered radio and though it was useless, decided to try another experiment to see whether the “rays” were particles, or some sort of electromagnetism. He put two other plates inside the tube on either side of the beam and put an electrical potential across the plates. The electrical field between the plates should bend the beam, if it were particles. He didn’t see it happen, but it turned out his apparatus just wasn’t good enough. Later Arthur Shuster repeated the experiment with a better vacuum in the tube and did see the bending. So the “particle” side of the argument was looking better and better.
Crookes himself put magnets on either side of the tube and got the beam to deflect in accordance with:
F = v⨉B
(You know, the right hand rule and all that.)
That just made the “particle” theory even better.
So there that stood at the end of 1894. But this time we aren’t going to stop there!
Recap
We had, up to this time, identified at least the following conservation laws that applied to any closed system (one where nothing could get in or out).
Conservation of mass
Conservation of momentum
Conservation of energy
Conservation of electric charge
Conservation of angular momentum
The following mysteries were unanswered at the end of 1894.
Why was the long axis of Mercury’s orbit precessing more than expected, by 43 arcseconds every century? Was it, indeed, a planet even closer to the sun? If so, it’d have been nice to actually see it.
Why was Michelson unable to measure any difference in speed of light despite the fact we, being on planet Earth that is orbiting the sun, had to be moving through the medium in which it propagates?
What makes the sun (and other stars) shine (beyond the obvious “they shine because they’re hot” answer). What keeps the sun hot, what energy is it harnessing?
How did the solar system form? Any answer to this must account for how the planets, only a tiny fraction of the mass of the solar system, ended up with the vast majority of the angular momentum in the system.
What is the electrical “fluid” that moves around when there is an electric current, and that somehow seems imbalanced when we perceive that an object has a charge? Were there both negative and positive fluids, or just one fluid that had a natural neutral level; below it was negative (deficit), above it was positive (excess)?
Why are there so many different kinds of atoms? How did electrical charges relate to chemistry? How is it that 94 thousand coulombs of charge are needed to bust apart certain molecules (though it often had to be delivered at different voltages depending on the molecule)?
Why were the atomic weights almost always a multiple of hydrogen’s? Why was it never quite a perfect multiple? Why was it sometimes nowhere near to being a multiple?
(and the 8 disappears?) Why does the photoelectric effect work the way it does, where it depends on the frequency of the light hitting the object, not the intensity?
Why does black body radiation have a “hump” in its frequency graph?
And remember we left the story of Ramsay hanging at the end of 1894, as he decided to look for other elements in the new “Group 0” of the periodic table, now represented by argon, whose mass was between that of chlorine and potassium.
And with that recap out of the way…
WE
ARE
READY
FOR
1895
1895
In November of this year, Wilhelm Röntgen was investigating all sorts of different “tubes,” the Crookes tube among them. He noticed that he could fashion an aluminum sheet with a rectangular window in it and block the cathode rays, but if he placed a board painted with barium platinocyanide ([Pt(CN)4]2−) near the window, the chemical would glow. Something was getting out of the tube and causing fluorescence.
On November 8th (a Friday) he decided to investigate further. He covered a Crookes tube with cardboard to block the light it was emitting (so he thought!), fashioned a similar window, ensured that the cardboard cover was completely covered by darkening his lab and looking for leaks. There were none, but he noticed an odd shimmering out of the corner of his eye. Striking a match, he realized it was his barium platinocyanide.
Over the next couple of days, he discovered that if the tube was firing while a piece of lead were in front of the barium platinocyanide, the lead cast a shadow (even though the cardboard around the tube clearly didn’t block the radiation, the lead did.) He also noticed quite by accident he could see the bones in his own hand by interjecting it between the tube and the barium platinocyanide. That was spooky, spooky enough to get Roentgen to conduct his experiments in secrecy until he was sure of what he had.
Since he didn’t know what these things were he called them X-rays; X often stood for “unknown.” Now that we know what they are, we still call them X-rays, though some also call them Roentgen waves.
The first ever X ray photograph was of his wife’s hand; when she saw her own skeleton she exclaimed that she had seen her death.
As it turned out X rays are also electromagnetic waves, they are of an even shorter wavelength/higher frequency than ultraviolet rays. “Most X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10 picometers to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz (30×1015 Hz to 30×1018 Hz)” (Wikipedia. A picometer is 1/1000th of a nanometer or one trillionth of a meter, a petahertz is a quadrillion cycles per second. Remember that visible light runs from 400,000 to 700,000 picometers.)
The Crookes tube was no longer a nerd toy. It was now a piece of medical equipment, and it was in practical use within months, probably the fastest a basic physics discovery has ever been exploited. On January 11th, barely three months after Roentgen started investigating the Crookes tube, it was used by someone else (John Hall Edwards of Birmingham, England) to find a needle embedded in a patient’s hand.
This wasn’t some obscure thing; it made the newspapers and this was before they were all fake news.
X rays were going to become a very useful research tool outside of medicine.
Roentgen received the very first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901, because of this discovery that had turned out to be so very useful right away.
And let us pick up our story of Group 0. Ramsay was preparing to look for more of these gases in the air, but during this year two Swedish chemists, Per Teodor Cleve and Nils Abraham Langlet, discovered a gas emanating from cleveite, an ore of uranium. On further investigation, this gas was totally non-reactive, and had an atomic weight of about 4. Well, that is perfectly midway between hydrogen (1) and lithium (7), and logically the top of that “Group 0” should be an element in between these two, so, very cool, the top of the column was in place. There was a gap between it and argon, and nothing below argon in the column was filled in yet. Ramsay would find neon, krypton and xenon in very, very tiny percentages in our atmosphere, and there’s even a bit of this top gas.
But we didn’t have to figure out a name for this gas. Because when we put some of it in a tube and got it to glow, and took the spectrograph…it turned out to be helium, the mystery element known from the solar spectrum!!! It wasn’t a metal after all, but a gas; logically it should be named “helion” (to match the -on ending of the other gases in that column), but…too late!
1896
Our main character here is Henri Becquerel (1852-1908), who was fascinated by phosphorescence. This was the way an object could absorb one wavelength of light for some period of time, then glow in a different wavelength for a time afterwards, as if the light “pumps up” the chemical which then gets rid of the energy later. He heard about X rays (who could hear anything else in the din) early in 1896 and thought, perhaps some chemicals might phosphoresce in X-rays after being pumped up in ultraviolet light, like from the sun.
Well this was easy to test. Wrap photographic plates up in paper, so that ordinary light and even UV cannot get in. Pump up a candidate mineral, then put it next to the photographic plate. If it is emitting X rays, those should fog the plate even through the paper.
Becquerel’s candidate material was uranium salts, which phosphoresced very nicely in visible light. He just needed a bright day to perform the experiment.
At which point, in Paris, it got cloudy. No bright sunlight to run the experiment in! He put the plates and the uranium salts in a drawer, and waited for good weather, smoke no doubt pouring from his ears.
After a days of this crap, he decided, “Aw, what the hell!” and developed the photographic plate.
This has to be the most consequential “Aw, what the hell!” moment in history.
The plate had blackened right next to his sample. It even bore the outline of a Maltese cross (OK, someone come up with a new idea), which was there to prove the fogging came from the sample, not some other cause–though the cross didn’t block the rays completely.
Something had blasted through the paper and reacted with the chemicals on the photographic plate. Something that didn’t need to be pumped up–or something that stayed pumped up.
And the world was never the same again.
This had actually been noticed back in 1857, by a friend of Becquerel’s family…who didn’t pursue it very far.
Becquerel did. And the world was never the same again.
Further experiments established it didn’t have to be a phosphorescent compound of uranium; any compound of uranium would do this. Pure uranium would do this. This had to do with uranium, and uranium would do this no matter what. By May of 1896 Becquerel had realized this, and published his results, and now the world knew of “Becquerel rays” which we now call “radioactivity.”
His own words from the 2nd of March
I will insist particularly upon the following fact, which seems to me quite important and beyond the phenomena which one could expect to observe: The same crystalline crusts [of potassium uranyl sulfate], arranged the same way with respect to the photographic plates, in the same conditions and through the same screens, but sheltered from the excitation of incident rays and kept in darkness, still produce the same photographic images. Here is how I was led to make this observation: among the preceding experiments, some had been prepared on Wednesday the 26th and Thursday the 27th of February, and since the sun was out only intermittently on these days, I kept the apparatuses prepared and returned the cases to the darkness of a bureau drawer, leaving in place the crusts of the uranium salt. Since the sun did not come out in the following days, I developed the photographic plates on the 1st of March, expecting to find the images very weak. Instead the silhouettes appeared with great intensity … One hypothesis which presents itself to the mind naturally enough would be to suppose that these rays, whose effects have a great similarity to the effects produced by the rays studied by M. Lenard and M. Röntgen, are invisible rays emitted by phosphorescence and persisting infinitely longer than the duration of the luminous rays emitted by these bodies. However, the present experiments, without being contrary to this hypothesis, do not warrant this conclusion. I hope that the experiments which I am pursuing at the moment will be able to bring some clarification to this new class of phenomena.
Henri Becquerel
Marie Sklodowska Curie (who is definitely not the subject of any “Polish joke”) was looking for a doctoral thesis topic and decided to investigate. Her husband Pierre Curie had invented an electrometer, a very sensitive device for studying electrical charge. She discovered that the air around a uranium sample was able to carry a current–the radiation was somehow making the air charged. Careful measurements revealed that the amount of radiation was directly proportional to the uranium in the compound. But this was a compound created in the lab.
And by 1898 she had noticed that thorium, too, was radioactive, though in this case she was scooped two months before by Gerhard Carl Schmidt.
Going to an ore that had had uranium in it for a long time, however, turned out different. The ore was four times as radioactive as the uranium that was in it. There was something else in the ore, something unknown, that was radioactive.
Her husband, Pierre, became so intrigued he dropped his own work on crystals to pursue this. They started with a carefully-weighted 100 grams of pitchblende.
They ended up going through tons of pitchblende. There was so little of what they were searching for that they needed to process that much pitchblende to find enough to actually experiment with.
In July 1898, they announced the existence of the element polonium. On December 26th, they announced radium. These were both elements of atomic weight higher than lead and bismuth, but below uranium (and there had been a big empty gap there in the weight sequence).
It took Marie Curie until 1910 to get a pure radium sample, and she never did manage to drag enough polonium together to constitute a “sample.”
Becquerel and the two Curies got the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on these phenomena.
Pierre was killed in a traffic accident in 1906; Marie ultimately received the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. she was the first to get a second Nobel, and is still one of just two people who have received two different categories of Nobel prize.
And this was just the beginning of what came of Becquerel’s What the Hell moment. We owe the nuclear bomb and the nuclear power plant and our entire knowledge of nuclear physics (and physics even smaller than that) to this moment.
What would have happened had he not done this? How long would it have taken?
Not all that long. Another scientist, it turned out was mere weeks behind him; if Becquerel had tarried publishing, he’d have been scooped. And if that hadn’t been the case, well someone would have noticed eventually, and pursued it.
This was rather surprising to me. It seemed as if this discovery were a freak accident that could have waited another couple of centuries to happen. It’s often used as the perfect example of serendipity; something turning up unexpectedly, but in front of a man with the imagination and intelligence to pursue it. (Read, sometime, the story of the discovery of teflon. Or penicillin.) Instead of that, it’s actually a discovery whose time had come.
1897
The man of this chapter was J. J. Thomson (1856-1840), and he too liked to play with Crookes tubes. He worked at the Cavendish laboratory (we’ve heard that before, haven’t we?).
He did some very careful, exacting work with both magnetic and electric deflection of the cathode rays. He used an electromagnet so he could vary the strength of the magnetic field (rather than simply bringing in a big permanent magnet). He then varied the electric field and the magnetic field until he got both deflections to be the same angle. His goal was to determine the charge-to-mass ratio of whatever particles were in the cathode rays.
The formula for the electric deflection is:
Θ = E e ℓ / mv2
While the magnetic deflection is:
Θ = B e ℓ / mv
Where Θ was the angle of the deflection, E the strength of the electric field, B the strength of the magnetic field, ℓ the length of the plates applying the deflection, m the mass of the particle, and v its velocity, and e the electric charge of the particle.
If the two angles are equal then we can write:
E e ℓ / mv2 = B e ℓ / mv
A lot of simplification and substitutions can reduce this down to:
m/e = B2ℓ / E Θ
The magnetic and electric field strengths were known, as was the length of the plates, and the angle of the deflection, so we now had the mass to charge (or charge to mass) ratio of these cathode rays.
It’s generally quoted as charge to mass, and its modern best value is −1.75882001076(53)×1011 C/kg.
Which means that a single gram of cathode ray “stuff” has a charge of −1.75882001076(53)×108 coulombs.
So that was pretty definitive, cathode rays are made of negatively charged particles.
Now if we step back to Faraday, who figured out that 96,485.3 colombs would break up one mole of electrical bonds, or as by now was realized, was the charge of one mole (one gram) of hydrogen, when the hydrogen had a positive charge, i.e., was a positive hydrogen ion.
The same charge on a cathode ray stuff would be carried by 0.000548 grams of cathode ray stuff.
The conclusion was that the cathode rays consisted of particles that weighed 0.05 percent as much as a hydrogen atom, or (taking the reciprocal) that a hydrogen ion had about 1823 times the mass of a cathode ray particle. (The actual value is closer to 1836, but that’s because a mole of hydrogen does not weigh exactly one gram.) Thomson actually got a value closer to a thousand, but it was still a striking figure.
Now up to this point, atoms were regarded as simple, indivisible things, that could get an electric charge to be sure, but were nevertheless indivisible. Now there had been scientists who had speculated that atoms might be made up of smaller things (William Prout and Norman Lockyer, for instance) but in the absence of any real evidence that’s all it was, speculation. Prout and Lockyer had figured the smaller building block was probably about the mass of a hydrogen atom, so basically hydrogen contained one of these items, helium four, lithium seven, and so on. (Of course they couldn’t explain why the ratios weren’t perfect clean integers and couldn’t explain the elements with large fractions (like a half) in their atomic weights.)
It appeared that the Crookes tube operated by knocking a very, very small chip off of an atom, a chip bearing a huge negative charge. The remainder of the atom had to bear a positive charge that matched. Certainly nothing as substantial as an entire hydrogen atom!
(However, Prout and Lockyer weren’t completely wrong, as we will eventually see.)
JJ Thomson in his own words (extracted from Wikipoo):
As the cathode rays carry a charge of negative electricity, are deflected by an electrostatic force as if they were negatively electrified, and are acted on by a magnetic force in just the way in which this force would act on a negatively electrified body moving along the path of these rays, I can see no escape from the conclusion that they are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter.
J J Thomsen
As to the source of these particles, Thomson believed they emerged from the molecules of gas in the vicinity of the cathode.
If, in the very intense electric field in the neighbourhood of the cathode, the molecules of the gas are dissociated and are split up, not into the ordinary chemical atoms, but into these primordial atoms, which we shall for brevity call corpuscles; and if these corpuscles are charged with electricity and projected from the cathode by the electric field, they would behave exactly like the cathode rays.
J J Thomson
The Electron
The new particle came to be known as the electron (not a “corpuscle”) and it soon became clear that this was our “electrical fluid.” You may very well use this word or its derivatives every day (it’s part of electronic, and that’s not a coincidental pun, the word electronic was derived from the word electron), but 125 years ago the word did not exist.
Any positively charged particle that could be ginned up in a tube (and there were indeed some even in Crookes tubes, these were known as canal rays) were basically atoms or even whole molecules with a positive charge. The measurement precision was too poor then to tell for sure, but these positively charged particles were simply a little light, because they were minus an electron. Or two, or perhaps even three.
Thomson concluded that an atom consisted of some number of electrons, embedded in a larger mass that had a positive charge; it’s called the “plum pudding” model to this day (actually, raisins but you know…the Brits).
Now we’ve wiped out one of our mysteries, number 5 above, and we now had an inkling of what was going on between atoms. A sodium atom, for example, could give up one electron and become a positively charged ion, a chlorine atom would scoop it up, and become a negatively charged ion. If enough of these transactions happened, you could crystallize all of these ions into a cube of table salt, or you could dissolve it and there’d be slightly light, positively charge sodium atoms and slightly heavy, negatively charged chlorine atoms floating around in the water. Since the total charge still came out to zero, drinking salt water wouldn’t electrocute you (but could kill you in other ways).
Generally, in an electrical circuit, it’s the negative electrons that move around, not the positive ions. So Franklin was right, there was one fluid. But he guessed wrong, too, in assigning the “negative” label to what turned out to be the fluid. But then Du Fay wasn’t completely wrong either; because there was clearly a positively charged thing out there, the bulk of the atom.
If you remember when I was talking about electricity, with the movement of the fluid, I implicitly assumed the fluid was positively charged, and moved from the positive terminal of the battery (or other power source) through the circuit to the negative terminal. So basically, I should go back and trash all those diagrams, right?
Nope. It turns out it’s mathematically equivalent to the real situation, with a negatively charged bunch of electrons flowing from the negative terminal to the positive terminal. Electrical engineers still simply pretend a positively charged current flows from positive to negative, because the math is exactly the same as running a negatively charged current from negative to positive.(Ask me how I know this.) It makes no actual difference. There are situations where it really does matter that the stuff that is moving is negatively charged, but that’s getting into semiconductors, and you’re moving from the realm of electrical circuits to electron-ic circuits.
Thomson showed in 1906 that the uncharged hydrogen atom contained exactly one electron. No more, no less. There was no way to knock two electrons out of it, as some had thought.
In 1905 he showed that natural potassium was radioactive.
He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906.
Alpha, Beta Gamma
OK, let’s return to radioactivity.
In 1899, right after the Curies found polonium and radium (unlike Vladimir Putin, Marie Curie killed herself with the stuff, eventually dying of cancer in the 1930s), Ernest Rutherford, a Kiwi working at McGill university in Canada, and Paul Villard in Paris, were able to determine that radioactivity, the actual stuff coming out of polonium, radium, thorium and uranium, consisted of three different types of thing. They did this by applying a magnetic field and seeing what got deflected, and also by noting how strongly penetrating the things were.
Alpha particles were massive, had a double positive charge, and would be stopped by a few centimeters of air or your skin or a sheet of paper. Rutherford, in fact, was able to measure the charge to mass ratio and by 1907 proved that an alpha particle was essentially a helium atom, with two electrons removed from it. So it had twice the charge of a positive hydrogen ion, but four times the mass (the charge ratio originally measured would be half that of a hydrogen ion). Their typical speed turned out to be four percent of the velocity of light (which is still 12,000,000 meters per second).
Beta particles were a hundred times as penetrating. Becquerel in 1900 had a comeback, he was able to measure the charge to mass ratio of beta particles…and they turned out to be electrons.
Gamma rays were found by Villard in 1900; Rutherford worked with them and fit them into his naming scheme in 1903. These turned out to be electromagnetic radiation, of even higher frequency (and lower wavelength) than x rays. They were very penetrating, indeed. Today, we know of some forms of radioactivity that produce relatively long-wave gamma rays, longer than some X rays, so the dividing line between X-ray and gamma ray is fuzzy. For EM radiation in this overlapping range of wavelengths, it’s considered a gamma ray if it came from radioactivity, an X-ray otherwise.
It was fairly easy to measure how much energy these particles had in them. It turns out that if you can wait for a kilogram of uranium to decay (which takes billions of years) you get 1.72 trillion joules of energy out of it. And that ignores the fact that what the uranium decays into decays again, and again, and again, adds more energy to a grand total of a whopping 22.8 terajoules.
Compare this to a kilogram of coal: rougly 24 megajoules. The uranium, just in decaying, contains almost exactly a million times as much energy as the coal, though it has to release it very slowly.
A lot of energy, released over a very long time….what does that remind you of?
Stars, I hope. Could this be part of the answer to what powers the stars? At first look, it doesn’t seem promising, and that’s mainly because we now had ways of knowing what was in stars, and there was very, very little uranium in them. But now we had a suggestion as to what the answer might look like, as opposed to just a shoulder shrug.
For now, let’s chew on this alpha particle a bit. It turns out to be a double-ionized helium atom. And it comes out of a block of pure uranium. Somehow, pure uranium seems to consist, at least in part, of He2+ ions.
Maybe Prout and Lockyer were onto something after all, if one atom could be built up, somehow, out of other atoms without it being a molecule, and only breaking apart through radioactivity. Of course the basic piece seemed to be a helium atom, not a hydrogen atom, but who was to say the helium atom couldn’t actually be a group of four hydrogen building blocks?
But regardless of the details, this explains a couple of things.
Remember those Swedes who found helium coming out of uranium ore? That’s why. The uranium was spitting out alpha particles, which were combining with electrons in the rock or the air, and becoming perfectly normal helium gas.
And when, in 1903, it turned out that natural gas wells in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas were producing gas that had a lot of helium in it…that made sense. That helium ended up deep underground because it was created there…by uranium and thorium radioactivity.
Every single helium atom on Earth today was once an alpha particle crashing out of a nucleus at 4 percent of the speed of light. You’re filling your balloons with chilled radioactivity.
And that part of the US is still the major world source of helium gas.
(Everyone say “‘Murica!!!” in a high, squeaky voice!)
Conclusion
What a wild ride in only five years!!!
We went from having no real clue that atoms had pieces, to having seen those pieces; we were starting to understand the structure of atoms. We now had some notion of what was going on in chemistry.
And the wild ride was just getting started.
And Joe Biden didn’t win.
A Personal Announcement
I’m probably going to be nearly buried by other obligations, and soon. At some point, I’m going to have to put the physics posts on “hold” and just do a complete skeleton of a post each week (I’d still include the bullion prices)…and this will last for a couple of months. If that’s not satisfactory, I suppose we will need another author to fill in.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
“Every time we turn our heads the other way, when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak up and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.”
Robert Kennedy
Welcome back to Wolf’s Pub! It’s Friday and we’ve been “enjoying” the bumpy ride of living in Jibberish Joe Biden’s America for five months now. I’d say that’s a good excuse to hearken back to a simpler time and enjoy a Grasshopper, that iconic American cocktail that embodies the sweetness of a time when phrases such as “the benefits outweigh the risks” could be accepted with a good will.
But first, let’s get to the down and dirty. They’ve been lying to us for a long time. They’ve been using all kinds of techniques on us, getting us to feel those emotions that make us easily manipulated:
FEAR
CONFUSION
ANXIETY
DEMORALIZED
It isn’t just the USA that’s experienced this kind of psychological operation. They’ve been doing the same thing all over the world.
Here’s Ivor Cummins, the Fat Emperor, and Laura Dodsworth discussing the PSYOPS that our governments used on us during the fake pandemic:
This prompted two replies (here and here), that tie right in with the psyops we’ve been experiencing since late in 2019:
Later, Concerned Virginian had an excellent comment about the CDC here. Partial below:
This prompted Emerald Star to reply:
Mantras, catch-phrase chants, sound-bytes, advertising slogans…PROPAGANDA and THOUGHT CONTROL.
AND THEN THERE’S THE ACTORS
Some Bitch Told Me chronicles how actors disguised themselves as reporters and then sought to blend in with MAGA at the January 6 rally. There’s video at the link, in which we see how the actors engage Americans who are understandably upset with our government’s behavior, and entice them to unload on the “reporter for OAN.”
The “reporters” later mock the Americans and twist things to suit their narrative. Another form of psyops.
I think this is where discernment comes in. We must be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” It is difficult to navigate the immense and pervasive psyops we’ve been under for decades now. We all get fooled, and it isn’t just “the other side” engaging in it.
Are we infallible? Nope. We all get fooled at times. But we have learned enough to see many of the tricks as they come at us and sooner than before. In fact, I would say we are beginning to learn faster than they are able to try new tricks.
GRASSHOPPERS AT THE BAR!
Yes, today our special is the Grasshopper, that minty sweet cocktail that saw its heyday in the 50s and 60s. It was invented in Louisiana in the early 1900s, and to this day is a favorite at one of the oldest “stand up” bars there.
I used to work in a smallish honky-tonk somewhere in the southwest, and yes, there were plenty of orders for Grasshoppers, even in the 80s. Of course, they are experiencing another surge of popularity as seen here.
Zany and fun video here:
Here’s a nice video with a history twist on the Grasshopper. Can you say Prohibition?
HOUSE RULES
We aim to please here at Wolf’s Pub, so do Make Nice. Rules here to review. If you need some “dangerous freedom” head over to the Utree, which is also a rendezvous in case we need it.
BACK TO THE PSYOPS
There’s always a spiritual element of the attack on humanity. From Ann Barnhardt:
Have you heard about Mystore.com? It’s Mike Lindell’s answer to Amazon. American-made products from Americans. Imagine where this could go if we support it! If you have a market-ready product you can submit it for consideration. This is just a wonderful and God-fearing idea whose time has come.
Incidentally, Mike’s towels are on sale ($39.99 down from $109.99 for a set of six) at My Pillow. Ends today! Use code: Warroom to get the sale price.
HELP WITH THE COVIDIOTS
Since it seems like the business fascists are attempting to implement injection mandates:
Defending the Republic (the incomparable Sidney Powell is looking for people to help with legal Covid issues). Watch here on Warroom with Steve Bannon (around the 39-minute mark):
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Robert Kennedy
ODDS AND ENDS
JIBBERING JOE BIDEN DIDN’T WIN. HE’S A FAKE AND A FRAUD.
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It is also a place to read, post and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name calling, ridicule, insults, baiting and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
Last week, we read about the need for Christians to return to an “Old Time Religion”, but, specifically, what might that entail? What are the essentials or basic beliefs and practices of that Old Time Religion?
The following are two articles that address that topic. I don’t intend for these statements to be taken as a complete statement of the basics, and I won’t defend them as such. However, they provide a decent overview to address what Christianity is all about.
Remember that Jesus did not present His gospel via a four-year intensive program of studies attended by the religious elite of the day. Jesus spoke to be understood by the rough, hard-working people of that time and, specifically, to the sinners identified in that society.
As an example of the simplicity of our beliefs, we have the incident of the thief on the cross. That thief simply said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” No walking down front, no special prayer being sure to mention 3 or 4 things, no special blessing or approval by a high-ranking member of the local church, no special religious rites to be performed . . . nothing else. That thief simply trusted in Jesus.
“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” Romans 3:10-12
And so it is today. God’s Word does not need a host of religious elite to interpret and expound, seemingly without end, the intricacies of the Christian faith. Christianity remains today as a set of core beliefs and practices meant to be understood, believed and practiced by the common people of our time.
At that time Jesus answered and said, “I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight . . . Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Matthew 11:25, 26, 28-30
In the essentials . . . UNITY. In the non-essentials . . . LIBERTY. In all things . . . CHARITY (LOVE – Agape Love).
What are the essentials of the Christian faith?
The Bible itself reveals what is important and essential to the Christian faith. These essentials are the deity of Christ, salvation by God’s grace and not by works, salvation through Jesus Christ alone, the resurrection of Christ, the Gospel, monotheism and the Holy Trinity. These are the main “essentials” that we should understand and believe if we are followers of Jesus Christ. Let’s look at all of these in a little more detail.
The deity of Christ. Quite simply, Jesus is God. While Jesus never directly says, “I am God” in the Scriptures, He makes it very clear to those around Him, especially the Pharisees and Sadducees, that He is God. John 10:30 says, “I and the Father are one.” Jesus was claiming deity, and, interestingly enough, He did not deny that He was God. Another example is John 20:28, when Thomas says, “My Lord and my God!” Again, Jesus does not correct Him by saying that He is not God. There are many other examples one can find in the Scriptures regarding Jesus’ rightful place in heaven.
Salvation by grace. We are all sinners separated from God and deserving of eternal punishment for our sin. Jesus’ death on the cross paid for the sins of mankind, giving us access to heaven and an eternal relationship with God. God did not have to do this for us, but He loves us so much that He sacrificed His only Son. This is grace, and it is most definitely undeserved favor. Scripture tells us, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). There is nothing we can do to earn God’s favor or gain access to heaven apart from His grace.
Salvation through Jesus Christ alone. A truly provocative question to ask someone might be “Do all roads lead to God?” The truth is that all roads do lead to God. Eventually, we are all going to stand before God when we die, no matter what faith we are. It is there that we will be judged for what we have or have not done while we were alive and whether Jesus Christ is Lord of our lives. For the majority of people, this will be a terrible occasion, as most will not know Him or be known by Him. For these people, hell will be the final destination. But God in His mercy has provided all of us the only means for salvation through His Son, Jesus Christ. Acts 4:12 tells us that “salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” This passage speaks of the name of Jesus and His saving power. Another example is found in the book of John. Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). No one gets into heaven except by faith in the saving work of the Lord Jesus Christ on his or her behalf.
The resurrection of Christ. Perhaps no other event in the Bible, aside from Jesus’ appearance here on earth and subsequent death on the cross, is as significant to the Christian faith as that of the resurrection. Why is this event significant? The answer lies in the fact that Jesus died and then after three days came back to life and rose again to reappear to His followers in bodily form. Jesus had already demonstrated His ability to resurrect others such as His friend Lazarus. But now God the Father had resurrected Him to display His awesome power and glory. This amazing fact is what separates the Christian faith from all others. All other religions are based on works or a powerless deity or person. The leaders of all other religions die and remain dead. The Christian faith is based on Christ crucified and resurrected to life. “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Lastly, to deny Christ’s bodily resurrection (John 2:19-21) is to deny that Jesus’ work here on earth was a satisfactory offering to God for the sins of mankind.
The gospel. In 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, Paul spells out what the gospel is and how important it is to embrace it and share it with others. He reminds the Corinthians of the gospel he preached among them: “That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” This is the essence of the gospel. Paul also warns us to be wary of the many “false gospels” that are being offered to the unsuspecting: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8-9). The pure gospel of Jesus Christ—His death on the cross for sinners and His resurrection to everlasting life—is central to the Christian faith.
Monotheism. Quite simply, there is only one God. Exodus 20:3 states very powerfully, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Monotheism is the belief that there is only one God to be worshiped and served. “‘You are my witnesses,’ declares the LORD, ‘and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me’” (Isaiah 43:10). Here we see that we are to “believe” and “understand” that God lives and is one. A Christian will know that there is only one God, the God of the Bible. All other “gods” are false and are no gods at all. “For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live” (1 Corinthians 8:5-6).
The Holy Trinity. While the concept of a “three-in-one God” is not represented by a single verse or passage, it is described frequently throughout Scripture. If we look at Matthew 28:19, we see the verse calling out the Trinity: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” While this verse mentions all three Persons of the triune God, it does not call them the Trinity. So to understand the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, we must look at the “totality” of Scripture and glean from it the definition. In 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, we see how this comes together: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.” Again, we see all three Persons being represented but not titled the Holy Trinity.
Faith. The essentials of Christianity would not be complete without the ingredient that binds everything together—faith. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). As Christians we live by this verse with the understanding that we believe in a God we cannot see. But we see His work in our lives and all around us in His creation. We do all of this through faith because we know that faith pleases God. “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6).
The core beliefs of Christianity are summarized in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4. Jesus died for our sins, was buried, was resurrected, and thereby offers salvation to all who will trust in Him in faith. Unique among all other faiths, Christianity is more about a relationship than religious practices. Instead of adhering to a list of “do’s and don’ts,” the goal of a Christian is to cultivate a close walk with God. That relationship is made possible because of the work of Jesus Christ and the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
Beyond these core beliefs, there are many other items that are, or at least should be, indicative of what Christianity is and what Christians believe.
Christians believe that the Bible is the inspired, “God-breathed” Word of God and that its teaching is the final authority in all matters of faith and practice (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20-21).
Christians believe in one God that exists in three persons—the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit.
Christians believe that mankind was created specifically to have a relationship with God, but sin separates all men from God (Romans 3:23; 5:12).
Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ walked this earth, fully God, and yet fully man (Philippians 2:6-11), and died on the cross.
Christians believe that after His death, Christ was buried, He rose again, and now lives at the right hand of the Father, making intercession for the believers forever (Hebrews 7:25).
Christianity proclaims that Jesus’ death on the cross was sufficient to completely pay the sin debt owed by all men and this is what restores the broken relationship between God and man (Hebrews 9:11-14; 10:10; Romans 5:8; 6:23).
Christianity teaches that in order to be saved and be granted entrance into heaven after death, one must place one’s faith entirely in the finished work of Christ on the cross. If we believe that Christ died in our place and paid the price of our own sins, and rose again, then we are saved. There is nothing that anyone can do to earn salvation. We cannot be “good enough” to please God on our own, because we are all sinners (Isaiah 53:6; 64:6-7). There is nothing more to be done, because Christ has done all the work! When He was on the cross, Jesus said, “It is finished” (John 19:30), meaning that the work of redemption was completed.
According to Christianity, salvation is freedom from the old sin nature and freedom to pursue a right relationship with God. Where we were once slaves to sin, we are now slaves to Christ (Romans 6:15-22). As long as believers live on this earth in their sinful bodies, they will engage in a constant struggle with sin. However, Christians can have victory in the struggle with sin by studying and applying God’s Word in their lives and being controlled by the Holy Spirit—that is, submitting to the Spirit’s leading in everyday circumstances.
So, while many religious systems require that a person do or not do certain things, Christianity is about believing that Christ died on the cross as payment for our own sins and rose again. Our sin debt is paid and we can have fellowship with God. We can have victory over our sin nature and walk in fellowship and obedience with God. That is true biblical Christianity.
* https://www.gotquestions.org/christianity.html
The church today is surrounded by, struggling with, and in many cases has been corrupted by, a liberal, secular culture and needs people who are not ashamed to proclaim the gospel of Christ. Truth does not change, and adherence to the essential or basic principles of doctrine is needed. These principles are the bedrock upon which Christianity stands, and, as Jesus taught, the house built upon the Rock will weather any storm.
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. (Matthew 7:24-25).
On this day and every day –
God is in Control . . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . . Keep Looking Up
Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn nor weep.” . . . “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Another week, another deluge of BS from the White House and from the Controlled Opposition.
The Audit continues.
The collapse of the Covidschina continues.
No doubt much will be said about those today. (And I have missed a lot this past week.)
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.
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.
The metals took a major thumping this last week! Gold was at 1860 on the 15th and has fallen a hundred bucks since then.
Light (Part VIII of a Long Series)
Introduction
The general outline of this story is to start off by putting you “in touch” with the state of physics at the beginning of 1895. Physicists were feeling pretty confident that they understood most everything. Sure there were a few loose ends, but they were just loose ends.
This week marks the end of that positioning. Next week we move into 1895.
1895 marks the year when people began tugging at the loose ends and things unraveled a bit. In the next three years, three major discoveries made it plain there was still a lot to learn at the fundamental level.
Up until now, I have been explaining what the scientific consensus was in 1895. So much of what I have to say is out of date, and I know it…but going past it would be a spoiler. So I’d appreciate not being “corrected” in the comments when I say things like “mass is conserved.” I know that that isn’t considered true any more, but the point is in 1895 we didn’t know that. I will get there in due time. (On the other hand, if I do misrepresent the state of understanding as it was in 1895, I do want to know it.)
Also, to avoid getting bogged down in Spockian numbers specified to nine decimal places, I’m going to round a lot of things off. I used 9.8 kg m/s2 last time for a number that’s actually closer to 9.80665, for instance, similarly for the number 32.
Introduction
Light is our primary means of sensing the world around us (closely followed by sound, which does take top marks when talking about interacting with people specifically).
So it’s pretty important, and of course we have worked to understand it basically since…forever. Thus it might be surprising to find it was still largely an enigma as of 1895.
As is so often case, the story starts with the philosophers of ancient Greece, who engaged in all sorts of speculation, perhaps the most interesting of which is that we saw by having rays go from our eyes to the object.
Lens makers were able to gain some understanding of optics and construct the first eyeglasses about 1300 and the first telescope in the very early 1600s. (The first patent was by Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands in 1608.) These were used to observe ships coming into port, but word got to Galileo Galilei in Italy. He constructed a much-improved version, turned it skyward, and our view of the universe hasn’t been the same since. (His telescopes still exist; they are in a museum in Florence, Italy.) I’ve told parts of that story in prior posts.
Fig 8.1 – Galileo’s telescopes
Newton Splits Sunlight
But the first step in our story today was actually taken by Sir Isaac Newton, in 1666. He famously used a prism to break up a beam of white sunlight into light of many colors, in a band called a spectrum, but he also was able to use a lens and another prism to reassemble the light back into a white beam. He was also able to show that, having isolated one color nothing could change that color, not shining it on other colored objects, or the same colored object. It could be blocked or absorbed, but the color never changed to another color.
Fig 8.2 – Prism spreading white light into a spectrum
Based on this he reasoned that (say) a green object looked green because it reflected green light and absorbed the other colors.
Thus white light turned out to simply be a mixture of colors of all sorts of different bright hues.
Noting that light split into colors going through a prism, he realized that light bends going from one medium (air) to another (glass) at an angle, and that the different colors bend at slightly different angles. Going through a pane of glass the two transitions (air to glass, glass to air) cancel each other out, but with a prism the surfaces are not parallel, so the different bending angles are compounded rather than cancelling.
Newton came to the conclusion that light was made of particles (which he called “corpuscles”).
Telescopes (a digression)
A lens in a telescope also has non-parallel surfaces, so astronomers using telescopes with lenses (“refractors”) will see “chromatic aberration” where objects seen in the telescope will have rainbow fringing around them. Newton invented a different type of telescope, one that uses a parabolic mirror to gather light, avoiding a large, expensive lens there; the eyepiece is still a lens. This (“reflector”) is the dominant type of telescope today (there are many variations. That is because a lens is much more expensive than a mirror of the same size and also because a large lens will sag under its own weight, whereas a mirror can be supported from behind.
Figure 8.3 – Keplerian refracting telescope invented in 1611 (an improvement over Galileo’s design).
The practical limit for a refractor was reached in the late 1900s, with the Yerkes Observatory’s 40 inch diameter telescope near Chicago. However, it was possible (with some epic difficulty) to build one-piece mirrors 200 inches across (Palomar Observatory in southern California) and even larger telescopes with multiple mirrors kept in close alignment (or even shifting for adaptive optics).
Figure 8.4 – Newtonian reflecting telescope, one of many variants
The Palomar Observatory was conceived in the 1930s, and finally came on line in 1955. It is without a doubt the premier example of pre-computer precision tech on a massive scale. It weighs two hundred tons yet is finely balanced enough to be turned with a motor that could drive a washing machine. The weight of a sandwich on the right part of the mount will cause it to turn, slowly, but turn nonetheless–that’s how friction-free it is. And it is still doing work. It still stands beside Hubble, and the big multiple mirror scopes on the Big Island of Hawaii. You can take tours in the daytime, but at night it might just be imaging planets around other stars, a feat thought impossible back in the 1990s. And this was 1930s technology. But then on the other hand, it was impossible to talk about Palomar in the 1970s without some dickhead bringing up the fact that the Soviet Union was building a 236 inch telescope. It was blatantly obvious they were doing this just to beat us out. Well, guess what; it turned out to be a piece of shit, so the joke was on them. (Please stand and yell, “‘Murica!!!” now.)
Figure 8.5 – The Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar. The vertical tube that’s basically a latticework is the actual telescope; the rest is its equatorial mount. The latticework’s diameter is over 17 feet (internal diamter 16 2/3 feet). (Note: I am surprised that Wikipoo doesn’t have a better picture than this.)
The Spectrum
Where was I?
OK, so let’s take a look at Newton’s spectrum. To our eyes, it’s a long color gradient, running from deep red through red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, and violet, eventually getting to a deep violet.
Figure 8.6 – And of course the picture I found has to be read right-to-left when following along in my text.
If you’ve seen people make that statement before you might notice it’s a bit off from your recollection. The colors quoted are usually “red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet,” and there’s even a cute “Roy G. Biv” mnemonic to help people remember the order. (I never needed it, I have no trouble visualizing red shading to orange to yellow…etc.) A lot of people have opined that “indigo,” a bluish-purple, hardly seems to be worth considering to be its own color (in particular, Isaac Asimov is quoted to that effect on Wikipedia). But that’s a modern confusion. Newton was the first to list the colors, and to him “blue” meant the color of the sky, what we call today a light blue, and “indigo” meant a dark blue, like seen on the Flag of the United States. There is even a natural dark blue dye named indigo (I don’t know if the color was named after the dye or vice versa). So indigo wasn’t “bluish purple” but rather “blue” in today’s parlance. And therefore I chose to use “turquoise” where Newton was referencing (sky) blue and “blue” where he said “indigo,” more in line with present day usage.
And indeed when you look at Newton’s spectrum, or a rainbow, there are distinct light blue and dark blue bands; today we’d probably term that light blue color “cyan.” They really are distinct colors even if our language doesn’t acknowledge it. (Other languages do, Russian for instance.)
Rainbows
Figure 8.6 – Double rainbow with supernumaries inside the main rainbow. Note the photographer’s head’s shadow is dead center within the arc, that shadow is directly opposite from the sun (the “antisolar point”).
I mentioned rainbows in passing, and as it turns out rainbows have exactly the same cause. Sunlight enters a small water droplet (approximately spherical) in the atmosphere, and gets refracted. It strikes the far side of the droplet, and some goes on out, but some gets reflected, and leaves the front side of the droplet, getting refracted again, constructively. Down on the ground, one tiny part of the spectrum reaches your eye; perhaps you see a certain yellow-orange color from that droplet.
“But I see the whole spectrum,” you respond. True. That’s because you are also seeing light refracted through other droplets, and you just happen to be standing where some other droplet is sending red. Or blue. Or purple. Since all of the red rays coming out of all the droplets are parallel (and likewise for all the other colors) you see a nice orderly rainbow.
But you will only see it with the sun behind you; the droplets are sending light back very roughly the way it came. Therefore at noon the rainbow would be at your feet (and there’s usually not enough water droplets between your eyes and the ground for rainbows to happen, not at high noon there isn’t), so that is why rainbows always seem to happen early in the morning and late in the afternoon. And of course they follow rain showers because rain leaves innumerable microscopic water droplets in the atmosphere.
Figure 8.9 – Water droplet diffracting light. If you happen to be standing where the red band hits your eye, a lower droplet will be sending yellow or blue or purple to your eye. That’s why red as at the top of the main rainbow, violet at the bottom.
Herschel and Infrared
The next notable discovery was in 1800, by William Herschel, also of fame for discovering Uranus in 1781 (and trying to name it after King George III…yecchh). He conceived the notion that perhaps the different colors of light carried differing amounts of heat, so he put thermometers in several different locations in a solar spectrum. Like any good scientist, he set up another thermometer outside the spectrum as a control. He didn’t expect that to budge, except perhaps in response to the room itself getting warmer or colder.
He happened to set the control thermometer next to the “red” thermometer, and that was a very happy thing.
When he came back to the test area to record results, the highest temperature was on the “control” thermometer. Not one of the ones that actually had sunlight shining on it! The next highest was the red thermometer, then less and less so towards the purple end of the spectrum.
Eventually the truth became clear. There was non-visible “stuff” off the red side of the spectrum that was associated with heat, and Herschel named it “heat rays.” It ultimately became known as infrared (below red). In today’s parlance, we consider it another kind of light, and distinguish it from “visible” light (Newton’s spectrum). It’s just as “real” as visible light, and we try not to be parochial about the light we can see versus the light we cannot see.
Ritter and Ultraviolet
The very next year, Johann Wilhelm Ritter placed silver chloride soaked paper along the spectrum. Silver chloride will darken when exposed to light (the sort of phenomenon that ultimately led to photography). Presumably he was checking to see which color of light would darken it the most, and the answer turned out to be the hitherto-unknown invisible light on the far side of violet. He named these rays “deoxydizing rays” but today we call them ultraviolet.
We now know that slightly over 50 percent of the energy we get from the sun is in the form of infrared, and ten percent in the form of ultraviolet.
Ultraviolet was discovered to kill bacteria in 1878.
The Speed of Light
The first meaningful attempt to measure the speed of light was by Galileo, but he failed to detect any time delay at all; as far as he could tell light was instantaneous.
Rømer later measured light as taking 22 minutes to cross the diameter of the earth’s orbit. We didn’t know what that diameter actually was back then, but now that we do, Rømer’s measurement works out to 227,000,000 m/s.
In 1849, Fizeau set up a rotating cog wheel. He shone light through one gap, towards a mirror, and himself looked through a gap at the mirror. He could alter the speed of rotation, and thus know how fast the wheel had to rotate to let him see the light in the mirror. At the wrong rotation speed the light would be blocked by the cog, either coming or going. So he could calculate the speed of light, and got 313,000,000 m/s.
Figure 8.10 – Schematic of the Fizeau apparatus. The light passes on one side of a tooth on the way out, and the other side on the way back, assuming the cog rotates one tooth during transit of the light. (Caption copied from Wikipedia.)
In 1862 Foucault (as in pendulum, not as in post modern bullshit) used rotating mirrors to get a speed of 298,000,000 m/s, close to today’s value.
However, it also became apparent that light moved at different speeds in different materials. It was fastest in vacuum. (In fact, these speed differences are what cause it to bend when it crosses from one material to another.)
Waves
People were arguing over whether light was made up of particles, or whether it was a wave, until the early 1800s, when Young and Euler showed beyond any reasonable doubt that it was a wave.
And now I’ve got to explain some stuff about waves. Let’s take waves on the surface of a pond as an example. Take a snapshot of these waves, and there will be two obvious things you can measure to describe the waves. First, the distance from crest to crest (or trough to trough—they are the same). This is called the wavelength, and is usually symbolized by λ, Greek letter lamba (representing the “L” sound). Logically enough, it’s measured in meters.
Figure 8.11 – Wavelength of a wave
The second is the amplitude, which is the height of the waves. However, there’s a small nuance here: It’s half the trough-to-peak height, because it’s measured from where the water level would be if it were calm, to either the peak or trough. (There are rare exceptions where something different is done; this is by far the most common, followed by something called RMS [“root mean square”] which is a sort of average deviation from “flat” and is used in electrical engineering to measure, for instance, the voltage delivered to your house.) Amplitude is measured in whatever the field is measured (volts for electrical fields, meters for water waves, etc.)
Figure 8.12 – Amplitude, as usually measured is arrow 1. Arrow 4 is the wavelength.
The higher the amplitude, the greater the energy in the wave, generally energy goes as the square of the amplitude–twice the amplitude, four times the energy.
OK, unfreeze the action. Take a movie. Go wading out into the water, and count how many waves pass you in a second. (It’s probably less than 1 if you’re wading in water, but roll with me here.) The number of peaks (or troughs) that pass you in a second is the frequency. It’s measured in per second, 1/s, also known as hertz, but we haven’t met him yet. We will. When talking about light, the frequency is represented by ν, which looks like a v but is actually the Greek letter nu (representing the “N” sound).
[Side note: The Greek letter upsilon (which has had a bunch of different values as time has gone on, but the consensus is in ancient times it was much like German ü. Today it’s like the i in machine) looks like this: υ and they look an awful lot alike in some fonts, which takes getting used to when trying to learn Greek. Mistaking a vowel for a consonant or vice versa when trying to sound out an unfamiliar word is confusing!]
If the waves are passing by at (say) ten meters a second, and you’re measuring a frequency of five times a second, that means five waves take up ten meters. That makes the wavelength 2 meters. Or, you can go at it from another direction. If you know the wavelength, and the frequency, you can deduce the speed; in our example, a 2 meter wave passes 5 times a second, so the speed is 10 m/s.
The speed of light is invariably represented by c and we met it in an unexpected place, buried in Maxwell’s Equations. For light, we can write the following:
c = λν
(If you have trouble remembering which one is which, remember lambda and length both start with L. If you can’t remember which one of those funky symbols is lambda…well, I don’t know a good trick to remember that, so hopefully you just can remember. It’s easy if you’re looking at the capitals: Λ and Ν, because capital nu even looks like an N.)
OK, back to our story. Young was able to demonstrate that light was a wave in 1800, by measuring its wavelength.
This measurement relied on the light waves interfering with themselves. And that’s another thing about waves I’ve gotta explain.
Imagine an ocean wave approaching a breakwater head on. If there is a wide gap in the breakwater, much wider than the wavelength, the waves will simply go through the gap, remaining parallel straight lines.
But if that gap is much less than a wavelength, something else happens. The gap behaves as if were a source of waves, and on the other side of the breakwater, waves ripple out as if a stone had been dropped in the gap. This is diffraction, and it can even force a laser beam to spread out. Doing it to a ray of sunlight through a very narrow slit was strong evidence that light was a wave; particles would simply have barged through the opening without changing direction.
Even better, what if there are two gaps in the breakwater? Then you have two different “sources” of waves for the far side of the breakwater, and the waves they produce will criss-cross. You can set yourself at some fixed point and find that at some places, both wave peaks (and both wave troughs) hit that point at the same time, resulting in the wave being twice as high there, and at other points, the trough of one wave will hit you the same time the peak of the other does, and vice versa…and they cancel each other out. The water is calm where you are.
Figure 8.13 – The actual sketch by Young of wave interference patterns for waves going through two slits. C and F are where the two waves add together,, meaning the interference patterns is bright here (when dealing with lilght), D and E are places the ripple patterns do not overlap so in those areas the waves will cancel out and appear dark.
Now go to the shore, and some parts of the shore will get very high waves, and others will get calm.
Picture, instead, light passing through two slits, being projected on a screen. You should see bright and dark bands where the waves add or cancel, respectively.
And this was done by Young in 1800, also.
But it was his measuring the wavelength that is key here. He found that light’s wavelenth is less than a millionth of a meter, depending on the color. Violet light’s wavelength would be in the neighborhood of 400 nanometers (nm, a nanometer is one billionth of a meter), while red light would come in at 700 nm).
We can get the frequency (what’s the frequency, Dan?) this way:
c = λν
c/λ = ν
So let’s see; about 300,000,000 m/s divided by say 500nm (a nice yellow color) gives: 600,000,000,000,000 hertz, or 600 terahertz (Thz, tera = trillion).
600 trillion is more than the national debt…well, this week anyway; check back next week, and that many waves go past you every second when you’re out in the sun, or for that matter, basking in light from a compact fluorescent bulb.
If you get the idea that a lot of progress was made on light in 1800-1801, you are right.
Spectroscopy
On the subject of stars, all investigations which are not ultimately reducible to simple visual observations…are necessarily denied to us…We shall never by any means be able to study their chemical composition.
Auguste Comte, 1835
This seems like a reasonable stance. How are we going to get to the stars to take a sample? However, this one wouldn’t age well. (Though oddly enough the first part of this remained true!) It was already coming undone twenty years before he wrote it.
And it almost continued into 1802. In that year, Wollaston (who would shortly discover rhodium and palladium–more chemists doing physics and vice versa) noted that there appeared to be a few gaps in the solar spectrum rather than it being a smooth continuum, but he didn’t pursue this.
In 1814, Joseph von Fraunhofer, working on improving optical glass, would invent the spectroscope for the specific purpose of obtaining spectra. He noticed a dark line in the light coming from flame, counted 576 such lines in sunlight, and noted other lines in the light coming from various stars. He was able to rule out the atmosphere as the cause because the lines were different for different stars.
Figure 8.14 – Solar spectrum with (major) Fraunhofer lines shown.
There are now over half a million known of these “Fraunhofer lines”
Figure 8.15 – LOTS of Fraunhofer absorption lines.
It had long been known that different chemicals could glow differing colors when heated in flame; soon other scientists were using a spectroscope to look at what these colors were made of. They often saw that the spectrum of these glows consisted of a number of bright lines against a dark background; the exact opposite of the sun’s black lines against a bright background.
Talbot was able to tell lithium from strontium by this means. Both gave off a red light, but lithium was carmine and strontium, scarlet.
It turned out that the bright lines and dark lines were often at the same frequency; it turned out that the dark lines were due to something absorbing light, and the bright lines were that same substance emitting light.
In the mid 1850s scientists began to realize that every element had its own characteristic spectra, and by 1865 they were attributing specific bands to specific elements.
Hydrogen, it turns out, has by far the simplest spectrum. There are four lines in the visible spectrum, at 656.274 nm (red), 486.135 nm (cyan), 434.0972 nm (bluish-purple), and 410.1734 nm (very purple). There are a couple of additional lines whose wavelengths are below 400 nm, and therefore technically considered ultraviolet, but some people can see them: at 397.0075 & 388.9064 nm.
Figure 8-16 – Hydrogen emission spectrum in visible light
Most other elements have dozens of lines in their visible spectra.
And now we could analyze the stars chemically, though Comte did have it right in one respect: we were still using their light, because we still can’t do anything else.
In 1868, in fact, a set of totally unknown lines was noticed in the Sun, and it was eventually concluded that this was due to an unknown element. We had no idea which element it was; I imagine that after Mendeleev published the periodic table people were guessing it would fill one of the holes he left open in that table. (There was no known way of predicting what the spectrum of an element would be; you had to measure it and catalog it for future use. Today we can predict hydrogen’s, but others are difficult if not impossible.)
Figure 8.17 – Spectrum of helium.
The element was known to be on the sun (and nowhere else), so it was named after the sun, Helios in Greek mythology, so (figuring it was a metal) they named it helium.
Other elements were discovered through the use of spectroscopes, which would tell scientists their sample contained something new. Cesium, rubidium, indium, and thallium were all discovered this way, and…every single one of them is named after the color of its spectral lines, sky blue, deep red, indigo, and sea green, respectively.
The 1860s were also the time when light was first recognized to be an electromagnetic wave, thanks to Faraday and Maxwell.
Christian Doppler
I told this story quite some time ago, and probably should not have, I should have left it for now. But it bears repeating even so.
In 1842, an Austrian scientist named Christian Doppler described what we now call the “Doppler Effect.” He was working with sound, not light, but it turns out the Doppler effect also applies to light.
Although the mechanism behind sound is very different from that of light, a source of sound still sends out waves in expanding spheres, just as a light bulb (or the sun) does. And the wavelength of sound corresponds directly to pitch: A short wavelength is a high pitch compared to a longer wavelength.
Sound travels through air (or other materials) as its medium. What happens if the source of sound is moving?
If it is moving towards you, at (say) half the speed of sound, then something curious happens. If it emits the peak of a wave at a certain time, well, by the time it emits the second peak, it has moved half a wavelength towards you. So what you will hear a sound of half the wavelength that was emitted, or twice the pitch (an octave higher for you music folks). Similarly if the same source moves away at the same speed, it will emit the second peak half a wavelength further away, so you will hear a pitch with 50% longer wavelength (a perfect fifth lower).
Figure 8.18 – A cheesy little GIF that hopefully will illustrate what I’m trying to say.
This effect was coming to people’s attention because they could hear it in train whistles as the train passed by. Of course the train might only be moving at 10-20 percent of the speed of sound, but that’s more than enough. At first people thought the train engineers were doing something to cause the phenomenon, just trolling the people outside the train, but that would have required multiple whistles at different pitches, and besides as far as we know none of them were ancestors of Donald Trump (though who knows about Melania’s family tree).
If you can determine the frequency emitted, and the frequency heard, you can calculate the speed of the source, but only along a radial line. It’s no good for transverse motion. (Likewise if you want to work with wavelengths.)
The Doppler effect also works on things that sound (or light) bounces off of. In fact this is how the local constabulary’s radar gun works; it knows the frequency of emission (since it is doing the emitting); it just senses the frequency of the returning signal and does the calculation and informs the officer whether or not he’s one step closer to meeting the quota he denies having to meet.
As I said, light is subject to the Doppler effect, and it’s possible to use that effect to determine how fast a star is moving in the radial direction. (Painstaking, detailed observations over time will reveal how fast it’s moving in the transverse direction, at least assuming other stars in the photographs are much farther away, and provided we know how far away the star is.)
Simply take the star’s spectrum and see how much it is shifted. If it is shifted towards shorter wavelenths (becomes bluer) it’s moving towards us, if shifted towards longer wavelenths (becomes redder) it’s moving away.
But wait…a star puts out all frequencies. If some blue wavelength gets shortened by 10 nm, won’t some slightly less blue wavelength get shifted into the position as it gets shifted 10 nm as well?
Aaah, but you see, a star’s light doesn’t contain all frequencies. The Fraunhofer lines are darkk! And we know what their frequencies are “supposed” to be, so when we see them shift, we can measure the red- or blue-shift of the star and get its velocity.
(Typical radial velocities are in the tens of kilometers per second, relative to the Sun which is also moving along with the herd. The true speed with respect to the center of the galaxy is a couple of hundred kilometers per second.)
Sometimes we can even tell how fast a star is rotating! Consider, the side that is moving towards you will look slightly blue-shifted, and the side rotating away from you will be slightly red-shifted. This will cause the Fraunhofer lines to get thicker as they are shifted in both directions at once, though they will also not appear as dark.
Neill de Grasse Tyson (yeah, I know, but here he’s talking about stuff he knows quite a bit about) considers the discovery of the Fraunhofer lines the birth of astrophysics, because it opened the door to knowing the composition and motion of the stars.
Black-body Radiation
Hot objects glow. You know this from watching embers in a fire or perhaps you’ve seen molten metal glowing either in person or in a video.
It’s also what makes an incandescent light bulb work. The filament gets hot; as much as 3000 K. Because it is hot, it emits light over a spread of frequencies. That would be enough to cool it off, because light carries off the energy, but of course there’s an electric current going through it and the filament is a resistor which means there’s a voltage across it and, well, power = current x voltage, and power is just a rate of energy, so more energy is coming into the filament as it is radiating away. (Radiating like this is one of three major ways to transfer heat, the other two are direct contact and convection.)
If you’ve ever seen an unfrosted incandescent light burning, that dinky little filament is bright. How bright it is, per surface area, is a direct consequence of its temperature. Imagine looking at a molten blob of metal at that temperature; it’d be very bright, every square millimeter of it putting out as much light as a square millimeter of the filament (which might not even have one square millimeter of surface area).
As it turns out a perfectly black object will behave in an ideal manner, so this is called black-body radiation.
Another thing that turns out to depend directly on the temperature is where the “peak” of the curve is. For some reason, the glow isn’t just done at any old frequency, there’s a distinct distribution, which is why objects that are glowing from the heat can be colored from red (relatively cool) to orange to white, and even blue. (That requires a temperature so high that you’ve probably never seen anything glowing blue hot…other, that is, than many stars in the night sky.)
Figure 8.19 – Color of the glow of a hot object versus its temperature in K. The sun comes in at about 6000 K.
Figure 8.20 – Black body spectral curves versus temperature. An elaborate classical theory gives the curve shown in black for 5000K, which of course doesn’t resemble the blue line very much.
Scientists were unable to explain why the curve didn’t just go higher and higher into the ultraviolet, rather than displaying the distinct hump you see here.
But one thing that should be plain, is that a 5000 K “white hot” body emits far, far more radiation than a 3000 K “red hot” body. At every single wavelength, even the red ones, the white hot object far outshines the red hot one. In fact, it turns out that the total emission goes up as the fourth power of the temperature: Double the temperature, increase the emission by 2x2x2x2 = 16 times!
Michelson and Morley
Albert Michelson was fascinated by light and experimented on it a lot. He pioneered the use of the interferometer…and I’m not going to try to explain how it works in brief, other than it splits a beam of light and sends one half at a ninety degree angle to the first. Both parts of the beam reflect off mirrors and meet at a detector. Do the waves constructively or destructively interfere? If destructive, you can shift one of the mirrors slightly to get constructive interference, and the distance you shifted is half a wavelength (so one can measure the wavelength of light by this means).
Link here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson_interferometer
If you get the thing set up so the two beams constructively interfere, you can rotate the entire apparatus 45 degrees to see if that changes due to, say, the light travelling at a different speed in that direction, because we (riding along on planet Earth) are moving through the medium through which the waves propagate.
If you were to try a similar experiment with sound on a moving platform, it would appear to move slower when measured in the direction you’re traveling, faster when measured backwards in the direction you’re getting farther from, and in the middle somewhere, just about at the rest velocity, to the sides. That’s because you are moving through the air that sound propagates through.
In 1887 Michelson and Morley built a very accurate interferometer, isolated it from vibration as best they could, and decided to try to detect our velocity through the medium it was presumed to move through, known as the aether.
And got nothing. We weren’t moving through the medium, and that was true no matter when we took the measurement, or where. At different times of the year the earth ought to be moving in different directions, so we should see something sometime even if the aether were moving along with the earth at one time of the year.
But nothing. Apparently the speed of light didn’t depend on how much the observer was moving; it was dead constant (in a vacuum).
Hertz and Radio
There is just one more story, before we assume the runner’s crouch in preparation for dashing across the 1895 line next week.
Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894, yes he didn’t even live to see 40) was looking for a topic for his doctoral thesis and noted the claim made by Maxwell in 1864 that light was an electromagnetic wave.
He reasoned that he ought to be able to create electromagnetic waves of much lower frequency by setting up a couple of long straight wires in line, with a tiny gap between them. By getting a spark to jump the gap he could set up a standing wave in the wires, which would presumably cause EM waves to radiate away from the wires.
Figure 8.21 – Circuit diagram of Hertz’s transmitter and receiver
Figure 8.22 – A crude photograph of the business end of Hertz’s transmitter.
So how would he detect the waves? He’d set up another circuit with a gap some distance away, and see if sparks jumped the gap in response to an electric field–the electric field of his propagating wave.
And indeed it was so! It was 1886 and Hertz had just discovered radio. He was transmitting, rather fitfully, at about 50 MHz, a frequency now used by television. Ironically, he thought it would be of absolutely no use whatsoever.
Hertz also noticed something rather peculiar. It was hard to see the spark at the receiver, so he’d put it in a dark box. But when he did that, he had to bring the two terminals closer together to get the spark to happen. Something in the light, apparently, made it easier for a spark to jump the gap. He put a window in the box, made of glass, and the spark jumping distance remained the same, no matter how bright the light was.
When he use quartz, instead of glass, he could move the terminals further apart again.
What was the difference? Glass blocks ultraviolet light. Quartz does not.
So there is something about ultraviolet waves that gives the electrical fluid in the receiver a bit of an extra kick. But not visible light, and certainly not infrared.
No matter how bright you make visible light, it doesn’t help. If light is a wave, the brightness corresponds to the amplitude, and the energy depends on the amplitude. But ultraviolet had an effect, even ultraviolet of much lower amplitude.
This is known as the “photoelectric effect” and, since this didn’t make any sense, it’s our 1895 mystery of the week.
Hertz, alas, passed in 1894…so he wouldn’t ever know the answer, nor how very useful radio turned out to be.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!
Remember Hong Kong!!!
If anyone ends up in the cell right next to him, tell him I said “hi.”
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 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 !!!
It’s sweltering in Texas, but it’s cool in Wolf’s Pub. Welcome back and head on over to the bar. It’s Modelo Time! We’ll get to that in a moment, but aren’t you glad it’s Friday?
What a week. So much news happening. There’s a couple things to think about today. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting angrier by the moment, knowing that fellow Americans are being held as political prisoners in a Capitol jail in D.C.
It’s an outrage. Y’all are idiots in D.C. Do you think we’re gonna be afraid and head into the shadows?
The treatment of our fellow citizens–being held in solitary confinement without bail while y’all try to pin an insurrection on us–is intolerable. We aren’t gonna forget what you’ve been doing to us.
The liars who run our media and our federal agencies (hey there!) may have been colluding to gin up a supposed insurrection. Imagine trying to indict all the grandmas and grandpas and veterans and small business owners in America that make up every-day Americans?
“Revolver News is willing to address the matter directly in the following three questions:
In the year leading up to 1/6 and during 1/6 itself, to what extent were the three primary militia groups (the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters) that the FBI, DOJ, Pentagon and network news have labeled most responsible for planning and executing a Capitol attack on 1/6 infiltrated by agencies of the federal government, or informants of said agencies?
Exactly how many federal undercover agents or confidential informants were present at the Capitol or in the Capitol during the infamous “siege” and what roles did they play (merely passive informants or active instigators)?
Finally, of all of the unindicted co-conspirators referenced in the charging documents of those indicted for crimes on 1/6, how many worked as a confidential informant or as an undercover operative for the federal government (FBI, Army Counterintelligence, etc.)?”
Y’all in D.C. are fools. And you look it. You’re an embarrassment. For heaven’s sake, come clean while you can.
That Buffalo Jump is ultimately proving to be a failure. Smart people had it figured out from the get-go.
The few good people left in government are sniffing out the stinking mess:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1405023243342282753
BREAKING: Congressman Matt Gaetz calls on FBI Director Christopher Wray to fully disclose the role and involvement of FBI operatives during the January 6th Capitol riot.
“The report in question alleges that federal agents were involved in the planning of the Jan. 6th riot and were violent participants. In fact, more than 20 co-conspirators involved remain unindicted despite participating in worse activities than many supporters who are now serving jail time.
Revolver News explains the pattern they found in the charging documents from January 6th: “In many cases the unindicted co-conspirators appear to be much more aggressive and egregious participants in the very so-called ‘conspiracy’ serving as the basis for charging those indicted.”
The report questioned why this is and whether or not some participants are being shielded from charges because of their involvement as undercover agents or informants for government agencies.”
Just in case you missed Tucker Carlson on the issue: Gab TV
Aren’t you D.C. types getting a bit sick of being made fools of by regular Americans with cameras and the alternative media? Doncha get it? You have been outed.
You people are owned. And now you want all of us to be owned, too. Sorry to disappoint, but we aren’t going to sell our souls, our fellow citizens, and our country out. And we won’t let you overcome us.
WE SHALL OVERCOME!
LET OUR PEOPLE GO!
A MEXICAN IMPORT WE CAN ALL GET BEHIND
It’s been so dee-dang hot in Texas that even I began to hanker after a beer. Modelo is our go-to around here. Modelo has been brewed in Mexico since 1925. The bar happens to have Modelo Especial on tap today. Enjoy!
Back when Maximillian thought he was going to start another empire in the New World (1864-67), a bunch of German and Austrian folks emigrated to Mexico and began brewing beer. The Mexicans gladly took over when old Maximllian met his fate in 1867.
Of course, the inhabitants south of our border have been brewing good stuff long before the Germans came along, but nevertheless, the fine pilsner that is Modelo Especial entices the pickiest of beer drinkers. You can read about Modelo here and here. And for some fun reviews of Modelo, see below (language warning at the second video):
https://youtu.be/wHWynMO4ZPw
Here’s a short history of beer in Mexico:
HOUSE RULES
While the beer mugs are filling, let’s review the rules here. Modelo is mellow and lovely. Good messaging.
Hit the Utree if brawling is your thing. The Utree is also a place to reconvene if we get separated.
ODDS AND ENDS
Bet you didn’t know that Bill Gates grows potatoes, and they often end up in McDonald’s French fries. Erb.
The Anatomy of a Smear Campaign chronicles how they are trying to discredit those interested in Q. They ignore Q but go after those who read/follow Q. Meh. Another failed plot. The socialist/prog/commie/globalists have lost their mojo.
Gotta follow Lin Wood. Man of God. Taker of prisoners. He’s kicking butt with those stupid lawyers in Georgia who tried to take him on. It’s a joy to watch him take down corrupt lawyers. A true joy.
And here’s a lovely video of Lin’s estate in South Carolina. Wow!
