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Schrödinger won the Noble Peace Prize
in 1935 because he created the experiment called Schrödinger's Cat. When Schrödinger did the experiment,
he put a live cat in a steel chamber with a vial of hydrocyanic acid, a hammer and a geiger counter.
The chamber had a radioactive material in it too.
If any of the material decayed then a relay mechanism took place and the cat was killed. The
problem was that the person doing the experiment would not know if the cat was dead or alive. Since the person didn't know, that was the Quantum Theory, because the cat wasn't dead or
alive. The box was broken open and the person would find out, if the cat was dead or alive.
Vocabulary:
Hydrocyanic acid-a
very poiseness liquid.
Geiger Counter-finds
and measures the
strength of radiation.
World War II had been taking place around the time that Schrödinger
created this experiment.
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In 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron.
In 1935 he won the Noble Peace Prize. Before he discovered this, people thought the atom was made up of only protons
and electrons. The protons were large and bundled together in the nucleus, and the electrons went around the
nucleus in a circle. The neutron was very hard to find because it did not repel the protons when it was in the atom. The apparatus was made up of a chamber on the
left, which was where the neutrons were made, and an ionization chamber on the right, which finds the protons. After this, the air was vacuumed out of the chamber. The radioactive polonium decayed
and produced alpha atoms. The neutrons were released because the alpha particles started to hit the beryllium. The neutrons hit a paraffin wax target, that released the protons into the ionisation chamber, that
identified the protons.
Vocabulary:
Apparatus-the device that Chadwick used
for the experiment.
Ionization-place to produce ions.
After Chadwick discovered the
neutron, scientists were capable of creating nuclear power, and weapons for World War II.
| Chadwick's Apparatus Experiment |
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