Scottish innovation VI

Science is fascinating, whether you believe it, care about it, understand it or not. It does not hold all the answers though, not yet, anyway. Then again, nothing does but just look how far we've come on the path to figuring out the conclusive 'what, where, how', and possibly the 'why' as it pertains to the universe and us.

Whenever a new discovery is made, such as the probable existence of the Higgs* boson particle yesterday, I feel excited and in awe of the minds that seek such answers. Then I spend a whole day reading about it, only to realize that I don't have any sort of grasp of what it means, or whether it truly propels us closer to the scientific truth.

In doing a good deal of reading today, I was mightily impressed with how many of the last 200 years' scientific innovations sprung from the great minds of Scots, of which the ones in particle physics especially captured my imagination.

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In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. Prior to this, science's understanding of the field was comprised of nothing more than unrelated experiments, observations and equations of magnetism, electricity and optics. He united all of these into a single, consistent theory, proposing that electricity, magnetism and light are all manifestations of the electromagnetic field. Maxwell's work had far-reaching consequences, one of which was the understanding of the nature of light. Its theoretical implications are credited for the development of special relativity in 1905 by Albert Einstein, who greatly admired him.

From 1855 to 1872, Maxwell contributed to the field of optics and the study of color vision, creating the foundation for practical color photography. His principle of three-color analysis and synthesis is the foundation of almost all subsequent photochemical and electronic methods of color photography. In 1861, he presented the first demonstration ever of color photography during a lecture on color theory.

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In 1861, Thomas Graham introduced and founded the field of study known as colloid chemistry. His research in finding ways to microscopically disperse a substance evenly throughout another substance resulted in his ability to separate colloids and crystalloids, using a so-called "dialyzer", the precursor of today's dialysis machine.

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In 1893, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson , interested in meteorology, began studying cloud formation and their properties. He went on to reproduce this effect on a smaller scale in a laboratory and began developing expansion chambers, perfecting the first cloud chamber in 1911. His enclosed chamber was the first detector of radioactivity and nuclear transmutation and went on to play a prominent role in experimental particle physics from the 1920s to the 1950s.

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*My nod to Peter Higgs, co-writer of the papers that in 1964, predicted the existence of the Higgs boson particle in order to explain the Higgs mechanism (sometimes the Brout-Englert-Higgs, or Brout-Englert-Higgs-Hagen-Guralnik-Kibble mechanism after its original proposers - the mechanism by which elementary particles are given mass. I discovered that he was actually born in Wallsend, Northern England but what does that matter in the grand scheme of the universe?

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Unrelated: a day where I wished that scientists could already have sorted out the process of beaming one's particles across oceans and reassembling at a chosen destination. Instead, after completing several indoor tasks, I beamed myself outside where my particles became liquid and formed a puddle, which made it a challenge to cut the foot long lawn in anticipation of possible rain. Upon reentering the air conditioned domestic chamber, my particles miraculously reformed into their prior configuration and my mass was no worse for the wear.