Category Great Scientist

How ‘Eureka’ Moments in Science Happen?

When the Apple fell on Newton or when Archimedes took a bath, history as we know it changed. Those are the ‘Aha’ moments when scientific discoveries were made. A look at some of these breakthrough moments.

Archimedes’ principle – Archimedes

This was history’s first-ever ‘Eureka’ moment. The story of how the Greek mathematician Archimedes discovered the principle of buoyancy is a tale worth recounting. It was whilst taking a bath in a tub that the idea hit Archimedes. When Archimedes noticed the amount of water being displaced from the tub as soon as he entered it, he reasoned that the volume of the water displaced is equal to the volume of the body that was submerged. He is said to have run across the streets naked, shrieking “Eureka” at his discovery of the law of buoyancy. And that gave us the Archimedes’ principle.

Periodic Table – Dmitri Mendeleev

For Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, it all happened in a dream. The Periodic Table of Elements as we know it was conceptualised in a dream. For months, he was trying to arrive at a logical way to organise the chemical elements. Although he knew the atomic weight was a crucial element, he couldn’t find a way to arrange it. One day, after racking his brain over the arrangement pattern, he fell asleep. And lo, the periodic table was born. The idea for the logical arrangement of the elements dawned on him during his dream. He later wrote “In a dream, I saw a table where all the elements fell into place as required.”

Law of Gravity – Isaac Newton

Every child grew up listening to the tale of how an apple’s fall changed science. It was when Isaac Newton noticed the apple fall that he first got the idea of gravity. He wondered what force attracted everything towards the Earth. The tree that inspired the idea of gravity in Newton still stands in the garden of Newton’s old home.

Penicillin – Dr. Alexander Fleming

The discovery of penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, revolutionised the course of medicine. Dr. Alexander Fleming had just returned from a holiday and found mould growing on a petri dish of Staphylococcus bacteria. The green mould Penicillium notatum prevented the bacteria around it from growing. He isolated the mould, and understood it produced a substance that could kill the bacteria. He named the active agent penicillin and thus the world’s first antibiotic was discovered.

First synthetic dye – William Perkin

The fashion industry must thank William Perkin for his discovery of the first synthetic dye. He was trying to find a cure for malaria, but he accidentally invented the first synthetic purple dye. Perkin was assisting German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann in the process of using coal tar to produce quinine which was an expensive anti-malarial drug. As he mixed different coal tar components with potassium dichromate and sulphuric acid, Perkin produced a purple sludge. The rest is history.

DID YOU KNOW? Newton recounted the story that inspired his theory of gravitation to scholar William Stukeley. It appeared in Stukeley’s 1752 biography, “Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life.” The UK’s Royal Society converted the fragile manuscript into an electronic book in 2010 and made it accessible online to the public.

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Are laser devices inspired by Einstein’s Theory of Stimulated Emission?

You might have come across laser pointers while attending a seminar or conference, or perhaps used it to play with your cat or dog. In the sixty years since physicists demonstrated the first laboratory prototype of a laser in 1960, it has been put to use in numerous ways from barcode readers to systems for hair removal.

The technology behind laser devices is based on Einstein’s Theory of Stimulated Emission. This theory came a year after the discovery of general relativity. Einstein imagined a bunch of atoms bathed in light. He had earlier discovered that atoms sitting in their lowest energy state can absorb photons and jump to a higher energy state. Similarly, higher energy atoms can emit photons and fall back to lower energies.

After sufficient time passes, the system attains equilibrium. Based on this assumption, he developed an equation that can be used to calculate what the radiation from such a system would look like. Unfortunately, Einstein’s calculations differed from the laboratory results. It was obvious that a key piece of the whole puzzle was missing.

Einstein resolved this by guessing that photons like to march in step. This would mean that the presence of a bunch of photons going in the same direction will increase the probability of a high-energy atom emitting another photon in that direction. Einstein labelled this process stimulated emission. He was able to rectify the disparity between his calculations and the observations by including this in his equations.

A laser is a device to harness this phenomenon. It excites a bunch of atoms with light or electrical energy. The photons released as a result are channelled precisely in one direction. Lasers are used in delicate surgery or industrial processes that require precision.

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Why is it said that Albert Einstein had even contributed to the daily functioning of Wall Street?

Wall Street in New York is the home of the New York Stock Exchange. An army of mathematicians are employed there to analyze and predict the stock price variations. Their employers can potentially earn millions of dollars based on their predictions about which way the prices will jump.

Mathematicians however say that stock markets follow a random walk. This means that unless some spectacular event occurs, the prices have the same chances of decreasing and increasing at the end of any day. If patterns do exist, they will be elusive and difficult to find, which is why financial mathematicians are paid huge sums.

Some of the intricate mathematics used for stock market analyses can be traced back to Einstein. He developed the fluctuation-dissipation   theorem to explain the random movement of particles found in liquids or gases.

This movement called ‘Brownian motion’ was first observed by the Scottish biologist Robert Brown. Brownian motion is highly similar to the price fluctuations seen in stock markets. The similarity was observed in 1970 and since then it has been used on Wall Street. Einstein’s paper on Brownian motion is still used as the basis for certain stock market predictions.

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Does GPS primarily use the General Theory of Relativity?

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity has predominantly found applications in astronomy through gravity waves, big bangs and black holes. One of its rather unexpected applications was in the multi-billion-dollar industry centred around the Global Positioning System (GPS).

All GPS navigators including Google Maps work by measuring the distance from one point on Earth to one of the satellites orbiting our planet. Though GPS was originally developed with military use in mind, it has since become an inherent part of everyday life.

GPS is based on a collection of 24 satellites, each carrying a precise atomic clock. A hand-held GPS receiver which detects radio emissions from any satellite overhead can find the latitude, longitude and altitude with accuracy up to 15 metres and local time to 50 billionths of a second. The clocks on satellites are ahead of those on Earth by 38,000 nanoseconds. The reason for this is explained by the General Theory of Relativity. Though it may appear as an inconsequential amount of time, if these nanoseconds are not taken into account, GPS systems would be highly inaccurate.

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In which universities did Einstein serve as a professor till the 1930s?

Despite publishing four ground-breaking scientific papers in 1905 and earning his doctorate, Einstein still had difficulty finding a teaching job. He finally became a lecturer at the University of Berne in 1908. He received more opportunities in academia as his reputation as a theoretical physicist grew.

A year after joining the University of Berne he became an associate professor of physics at the University of Zurich. In 1911, he became a full professor at the University of Prague but returned after a year as a full professor to Zurich. The highlight of his academic career was when he became a professor at the University of Berlin and a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

He had also been the Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Einstein earned the salary of a professor without any teaching duties at the University of Berlin. As a result, he could pursue his research full time. He remained in the University of Berlin until the early 1930s.

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What was the role Satyendra Nath Bose played in Einstein’s scientific life?

 

 

Einstein received a paper from Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose in 1924. The paper was on a new perspective: to think of light as a gas filled with indistinguishable particles. Einstein recognized the relevance of the paper. He translated it to German and submitted it on behalf of Bose to the famous journal Zeitschrift fur Physik. Bose went to Europe and worked with Einstein at the X-ray and crystallography laboratories there.

Einstein worked with Bose to extend his idea to atoms and they predicted a new state of matter which came to be called the Bose-Einstein Condensate. A Bose-Einstein Condensate is a dense collection of particles with integer spin known as Bosons.

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