Today is the electron’s birthday. In 1874, Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney suggested that there existed a “single definite quantity of electricity,” the charge of a monovalent ion. But that was a conjecture. He named the particle an electron.
On April 30, 1887 at the Royal Institution, British physicist J. J. Thomson (1856 – 1940) announced the discovery of a particle that is over 1,800 times lighter than a proton. Using a cathode ray tube he found the cathode rays bent in electric and magnetic fields thus showing that they were made of tiny, negatively charged particles were electrons, much smaller than atoms.
As it happened, Thomson’s son, George Paget Thomson (1892 – 1975), experimentally demonstrated electron diffraction in 1927 thus confirming Louis de Broglie’s theory that particles also behave like waves. George Thomson was awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 1937. The father showed that electrons are particles, and the son showed that electrons were waves.
It is also a sort of birthday for the world wide web. On April 30, 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web in the public domain. The web had been invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and was initially used internally for sharing scientific information. The 1993 release removed any barriers (no patents, no royalties, no fees), allowing rapid global adoption. CERN officially put the World Wide Web software (including the underlying code for the web protocols, the first browser/editor, and related tools developed by Tim Berners-Lee) into the public domain.
To celebrate those two important birthdays, let’s listen to some electronic music. From my college days, The Moog & Me.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 