Hydrogen

The Essential Element

John S. Rigden

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780674012523, 9780674007383
• eBook ISBN: 9780674260047
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Seduced by simplicity, physicists find themselves endlessly fascinated by hydrogen, the simplest of atoms. Hydrogen has shocked, it has surprised, it has embarrassed, it has humbled--and again and again it has guided physicists to the edge of new vistas where the promise of basic understanding and momentous insights beckoned. The allure of hydrogen, crucial to life and critical to scientific discovery, is at the center of this book, which tells a story that begins with the big bang and continues to unfold today.

In this biography of hydrogen, John Rigden shows how this singular atom, the most abundant in the universe, has helped unify our understanding of the material world from the smallest scale, the elementary particles, to the largest, the universe itself. It is a tale of startling discoveries and dazzling practical benefits spanning more than one hundred years--from the first attempt to identify the basic building block of atoms in the mid-nineteenth century to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate only a few years ago. With Rigden as an expert and engaging guide, we see how hydrogen captured the imagination of many great scientists--such as Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Rabi--and how their theories and experiments with this simple atom led to such complex technical innovations as magnetic resonance imaging, the maser clock, and global positioning systems. Along the way, we witness the transformation of science from an endeavor of inspired individuals to a monumental enterprise often requiring the cooperation of hundreds of scientists around the world.

Still, any biography of hydrogen has to end with a question: What new surprises await us?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter 1. In the Beginning: Hydrogen and the Big Bang
• Chapter 2. Hydrogen and the Unity of Matter: The Prout Hypothesis
• Chapter 3. Hydrogen and the Spectra of the Chemical Elements: A Swiss High School Teacher Finds a Pattern
• Chapter 4. The Bohr Model of Hydrogen: A Paradigm for the Structure of Atoms
• Chapter 5. Relativity Meets the Quantum in the Hydrogen Atom
• Chapter 6. The Fine-Structure Constant: A Strange Numberwith Universal Significance
• Chapter 7. The Birth of Quantum Mechanics: The Hydrogen Atom Answers the “Crucial Question”
• Chapter 8. The Hydrogen Atom: Midwife to the Birth of Wave Mechanics
• Chapter 9. The Hydrogen Atom and Dirac’s Theory of the Electron
• Chapter 10. Hydrogen Guides Nuclear Physicists: The Discovery of Deuterium
• Chapter 11. Hubris Meets Hydrogen: The Magnetic Moment of the Proton
• Chapter 12. The Magnetic Resonance Method: The Origin of Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Chapter 13. New Nuclear Forces Required: The Discovery of the Quadrupole Moment of the Deuteron
• Chapter 14. Magnetic Resonance in Bulk Matter (NMR)
• Chapter 15. Hydrogen’s Challenge to Dirac Theory: Quantum Electrodynamics as the Prototype Physical Theory
• Chapter 16. The Hydrogen Atom Portends an Anomaly with the Electron
• Chapter 17. Hydrogen Maps the Galaxy
• Chapter 18. The Hydrogen Maser: A High-Precision Clock
• Chapter 19. The Rydberg Constant: A Fundamental Constant
• Chapter 20. The Abundance of Deuterium: A Check on Big Bang Cosmology
• Chapter 21. Antihydrogen: The First Antiatom
• Chapter 22. The Bose-Einstein Condensate for Hydrogen
• Chapter 23. Exotic Hydrogen-like Atoms: From Theory toTechnology
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index