What was the first particle ever discovered? And how was it discovered?

What does it mean to be first? Join Daniel and Jorge to learn about the first ever particle discovered.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Okay, why do you think people are preoccupied with being first?
What do you mean, you know, like first person on
the moon, first person or run four minute mile. Yeah,
I see what you mean. There's kind of an obsession
right with being first. But you know, I think last
can be good too. What who wants to be last?
You know, like the last cookie in the box is
always the tastiest. The last person to arrive at the

(00:30):
party makes you the coolest person. That's true. That's true.
Last person to turn in their project but still be
on time, that's right. I am a big believer in
optimal procrastination. Hi. I'm or Hey. I'm cartoonists and the

(01:01):
creator of PhD comics. Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle
physicist and I'm sitting in a closet in Aspen, Colorado.
I didn't know you were in the closet, Daniel, I'm
more literally in the closet than figuratively in the closet,
only only in Aspen, Colorado. That that is a wild
world place. It is a beautiful place. I'm here because

(01:23):
I'm at the Aspen Center for Physics for a week,
where people come from all over the country to sort
of sit around and think about big ideas and think
about the future of physics and brainstorm new experiments and
think about the history of physics. Also, wow, pretty cool.
Is that something that happens every year? Yeah, every summer
physicists come to Aspen and think big thoughts while surrounded
by rich people. You're saying like, that's an exclusive thing.

(01:48):
You can't be rich and a physicist. Well, it feels
like an Aspen. There's two kinds of people, the rich
people and the physicists. But it's fun to be here
and to think about, you know, all the physics that's
been done in the last fifty years of pysis that
will be done in the next fifty years. And also
makes me think back about the origin of physics, you know,
like where this all started. Yeah, so welcome to our party.

(02:08):
Our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production
of I Heart Radio. That's right, our podcast in which
we think about all the big things, the hard things,
the new things, the old things, and try to explain
them to you in any way that we hope is educational, understandable,
and maybe a little entertaining. First things, the last things,
the things that made it just in time, not to

(02:28):
be late all the things that's right. We should do
a podcast on people who won the Nobel Prize and
their discovery came in just in time before the threshold. Well,
I always say that, you know, when I see grass
students really stressed out, I always tell them that, you
know what you even if you get to c you
still get a PhD. That's true. It took me a
while to understand that nobody in graduate school cares about

(02:51):
grades like you get, you gonna a minus, you gotta
be doesn't really matter anymore because just surviving is all
that matters. Yeah, but they do care about in science,
about being first, right, Like that's a huge deal. It
is a huge deal, and first counts for a lot.
Like if you're the first person to publish an idea
in a paper, even if you're first by one day,

(03:12):
which means the other folks were thinking about it at
the same time as you were, they just didn't put
their paper out, you get primary credit for it, so
it matters a lot. Yeah, you get the particle named
after you, you get um people making videos about you online. Yeah,
it's basically first, and then there's everybody else. And I'm
saying that's the right way to do it, or that
it's fair, or that it's healthy. Um, it's a little

(03:34):
bit insane, but it's sort of the way we do things.
There's a system where we put articles on the Internet,
and the order in which the articles appear on the
Internet for that day's listings depends on how close your
submission was to four pm Eastern Time. So every day
at three fifty nine Eastern time, there's a bunch of
physicists sitting around their computers trying to click their paper

(03:57):
in just past the deadline. It's like an Internet comments
where the first person always says first first comment. It's
saying there's just a bunch of Internet trolls. That's right,
Internet trolls with PhDs. Yeah, that's basically describes our field.
But first of discovers a big deal. But maybe an
even bigger deal is to discover the first of something, right,

(04:19):
like the first planet or the first moon or the
first asteroid. Those are pretty big too, even maybe more
important than getting the credit. Yeah, it's sort of like
a categorical discovery, right, you discover a whole new kind
of thing. The first person to discover, you know, a
new kind of like marsupials or something. Right, It's like, whoa,
It's not only are you found a new animal, you

(04:40):
found a whole new category of animals. That's pretty cool. Yeah,
it changes everyone's perspective about things, right, I mean to
be the first to discover a giraffe, I mean that
probably blue people's mind. Yeah. And and that's the idea,
is that the first person is one that really carries
the most information. Like if you have the first person
to have this new idea of an new way of
thinking about the universe, or the first person to find

(05:03):
something out, that's the piece of information. Right. That's how
humanity sort of learned about it. And that's why I
think being first is prized. It's not just like Usain Bolt, um,
you know, running over the finish line of tiny bit
faster than the next guy or the next gal. It's
it's really about who's delivering the information, who's making that
sort of intellectual leap forward? Yeah, like who planted that

(05:25):
flag on that new continent? Right, Like you're literally out
there by yourself. Yeah, except that it turns out there
is usually indigenous people that you've slogged on the way.
But that is side side let's not let's not make
the analogy physicist and complete. Let's not promote white based
yours central colonialism on this show. But yeah, I say
you're the first personal end of the moon. Right then

(05:46):
you're doing something no human being has ever done before.
That really is an important moment. And so today this
might be the first in a series of episodes about
first and today we're going to be talking about the
first particle. Who discovered the first particle? And what was

(06:10):
the first particle discovered? Yeah, and this is a fascinating story.
Not only did he discover particles, he sort of invented
the concept of particles, which is something we're sort of
still struggling to figure out, Like what is a particle?
We've talked about on this podcast a few times, Like
what does that mean philosophically? What does it look like?
What are we really talking about? Do we have more
than just a mathematical model. Do we have like a

(06:31):
complete understanding what a particle is? Anyway, And so it's
instructive to go back to sort of the first time
anybody said, oh, look I found a particle, to understand
what made them think it was a particle? What ideas
did they have that justified this creation of a whole
new concept. Yeah, and it's a big deal because everything
is made out of particles, right, It's what makes up

(06:51):
the things in the universe. Everything's made out of a particle. Well, yeah, everything,
if you mean everything, the five percent of the universe
that he knows made out of particles. Right. I didn't
tell you that I know what dark matter and dark
energy I part made of. I didn't. I forgot to
mention mastered those concepts. It was more for our listeners.
I know that you're aware of dark matter and dark energy,

(07:11):
but you know it's dark energy. We don't know what
it is. Dark matter might be made of particles, we
don't know, but it might not. But yeah, the rest
of all the stuff in the universe, stars and ice
cream and hamsters and all that great stuff is all
made of particles, right, And so it's fascinating thing about it.
And and I think we should clarify here when we
talk about particles, I'm thinking about it in the modern sense.

(07:32):
We have like twelve matter particles. We've thought about five
force particles. We've thought about not in terms of like elements,
which sort of an earlier development, which of the current
particles that we think of is not divided into smaller
bits was discovered, right, And there was a time in
our human history where we didn't know these things, right, Like,
we didn't know that we were made out of particles,

(07:53):
and we didn't know how many there were. We didn't
know what they were, what they looked like, are also
big they were so and it's pretty recent, right, Yeah,
most of human history we really had no idea. I mean,
Greek suggested this concept of an atom, that maybe matter
was divided into tiny bits, but that was just one
idea they had of like, you know, lots and lots

(08:13):
of ideas. So the fact that would happened to be right,
I think people give them too much credit for. But
the modern idea that matter was divided into these tiny
little lego blocks, essentially, that what seemed to us to
be smooth and indivisible and continuous was actually just like
made of super tiny little pixels. That's a pretty modern idea.
The origin of it comes in the eighteen hundreds, you know,

(08:36):
with chemistry. People started to think about, you know, reactions
between different gases and stuff, and they noticed that these
gases had reactions in these patterns which suggested that there
was like individible little units of the gases, which of
course turned out to be atoms and molecules. Right, I
imagined that maybe not a lot of people out there
know what was the first particle discovered? Right? I mean,

(08:58):
you know, if I had to guess, um, I don't
know what I would say. You know, protons, neutrons, the particles.
I'm thinking of the twelve matter particles. We have six leptons,
those electron muan tao, and then three neutrinos and then
six quarks right the up down strange charm bottom top.
So if those particles, I was wondering, did people know,

(09:20):
you know, which was the first discovered? People have any idea?
And so I walked around and I asked people what
was the first particle discovered? And again these these interviews,
you'll hear we're not done at U c Irvine, but
actually in the airport at Heathrow, um, and so you'll
hear some international voices. So think back, if somebody ask
you what was the first what do you think the
first matter particle discovered? Was? What would you say to

(09:43):
a random stranger at an airport in London here's what
people have to ask you physics questions before you call security.
Think about what your answer would be. Well, here's what
those travelers had to say, iron, I don't know, oxygen
or probably the electron electrons, I imagine, all right, a
lot of good guesses there. So people said iron, some

(10:05):
people said the proton, some people said oxygen. Yeah, exactly.
I think a lot of people when I said particle,
they thought elements, they thought atoms, um And I'm not
sure if that's because they weren't aware of the structure
of matter sort of below the atomic level, or they
just thought that that still counts as the particle. But
you know, in modern day particle physics, we don't think
of oxygen as a particle. It's basically like a huge construction,

(10:27):
you know, it's a it's massive on the particle scale. Yeah,
and we're so we're talking about the discovery of the
things that atoms are made at. We know that matter
is made out of molecules, and molecules are made out
of atoms, and atoms are made out of smaller things
that we so far don't know that they can be
split anymore. Right, that's right. And we know that these
particles that some of those particles makeup atoms right up,

(10:50):
quirks down, corks and electrons makeup atoms. But there are
other particles out there, right, There's lots of other particles.
There's twelve of them, and so it could be that
when you discover particle, it's not a particle that exists
in the atom, right, or it could be a particle
that helps them solve the puzzle of how the atoms
put together. Um, so there's more particles out there than
sort of exist in your ice cream besides the chocolate chips, right,

(11:12):
and the that is a fundamental unit of happiness, but
not a fundamental unit of the universe and charcolate chips up.
But so at some point we thought adams were like
the smallest things in the universe, right, But then we
find out that there are there. They're actually made out
of particles. And so one of those particles was the
first one discovered, and so the question is which one

(11:34):
was it? That's right, So I thought it'd be fun.
We'll walk you through the experiment from the point of
view of the experiment or right, what were they doing?
What were they trying to figure out? Why did they
do it, what do they learn? And at the end
we'll we'll reveal what the first particle was that was
discovered by this experiment. A mystery, an ice cream exactly.
Nobody dies in this mystery. We well they did die,

(11:59):
but um at the time they were due to this mystery.
Nobody was killed by this particle. All right, let's get
into that's not true. People are killed by this particle
all the time. All right, let's get into the story.
But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're

(12:25):
trying to piece together the story of which was the
first particle discovered ever so the first time that we
figured out that the atom is not the fundamental unit
of the universe. So so step us thirty daniel, what
what what year is it? What what year are we in?
And what was what we're people thinking? Cast your mind

(12:45):
back thirteen or so decades to the late eighteen hundreds,
and back then, physicists we're really just starting to make
any any progress in like understanding the thing around this
stuff around us. Back then, physics was like, okay, we
got this kind of thing. We got magnetism, we got
you know, people get electrically zapped. We got gravity, we

(13:06):
have just like a long list of things that we
don't understand, and compared to modern physics, where we feel
like most of the stuff around us we understand, you know,
the macroco the macroscopic scale. Right, it's rare these days
that you see something happened you're like, whoa, that's just
totally a mystery. Back then, there was a lot of
stuff going on that people didn't understand, and so people
were just sort of investigating it, playing with it, right.

(13:28):
They didn't understand what gamma rays were, X rays were
and all this stuff. Now we have a holistic understanding.
But back then there were a lot of these mysteries
and one of them. One of them was cathode rays.
This is something people had created and we're playing with
but didn't really understand. It's amazing to think have that mindset, right,
Like there's so many weird things going on and you're

(13:49):
just like, oh, well, I'll just go about my life anyways. Yeah.
And you know, also, there were many fewer people doing
science back then, um, and so there's just a lot
less progress being made. And I wonder what it's like
sometimes to live in the universe where you know their
natural things happening for which we just do not have
an axclanation, like in your everyday life. Yeah, Like you're

(14:10):
walking around and it's like, oh, look at that cloud.
I have no idea what the thing is made out of?
Or yeah exactly could who knows somebody painting it blue?
Yeah right? Or why is lightning strike? Or what is lightning? Right? Um,
all this kind of stuff, or what is disease? Right?
People had no idea how disease was transmitted. Um. My

(14:31):
wife tells me this story about how until fairly recently,
doctors used to go from doing autopsies on cadavers to
delivering babies without washing their hands because they just didn't
understand right that what disease was. And so it's hard
to it hard sometimes to put your mind in in
the mindset of what people were like back then. But

(14:51):
back then people were playing with Catherine Raise and until recently,
cathode rays were pretty common. They're what used to make
TVs work. It's a little beam of electrons east sweep
along the back of the screen and make the picture
on the screen. These days everybody has a flat screen.
But you know those old deep TVs, the ones that
are pretty thick. Yeah, those have a little beam of
particles at them. Back then people were playing with them

(15:12):
because they were pretty easy to make. All you need
to do was make some like glass tube that was
mostly that was a pretty good vacuum, and you'd put
some material and it's some metal and you'd um, you'd
heat it up and then it put some electrical voltage
across it and you would get these crazy glowing rays
that shot from one side of the tube to the other. Ah,

(15:33):
whoa yeah, And they were like it was like a
side show. People were like go around like you know circuses,
like oh, here see the bearded lady. See the man
who can make glowing rays in the tube, you know,
and nobody understood it. But it was just this like
weird thing. And that's why it's called cathode ray tube,
Like yeah, like those old monitors and TVs or they're

(15:54):
called c rt s because that's what it stands stands for,
right exactly. And you know, Kathy, it comes from the
fact that you have a voltage across as you have
an an node and a cathode, right, and and you
would get these weird rays and nobody understood, like what
is this ray you couldn't like put your hand in
there because it was inside the tube and like touch it.
People were wondering, like is a ray a fundamental thing

(16:17):
of the universe? Right? They didn't know, and like I
can make this thing glow, but you know, everything in
the universe is a mystery, is indistinguishable from magic until
physics basically takes it apart and understand it. Either I
could say that's either ruining the magic or you know,
revealing the mysteries. Physicists killing the magic since late eighteen hundreds,

(16:40):
physicists capturing the magic to make better TVs for you
about that, or thinking the magic and then publishing a
long paper about it and hopes that they get the
Nobel Price about it and getting it in just on
time before they did. So we were in late eighteen hundreds,
and you know that, I imagine there's also all kinds
of weird thing is going on, right, Like Tesla was

(17:01):
around that time to write and just the people people
were playing with electricity and magnetism, and it was people
were just starting to understand how those two things were connected.
But there was lots of there was like every day
there was some physics experiments somebody did with the result
that people didn't understand, you know, which almost never happens anymore.
But back then there was just like tons of stuff

(17:22):
that nobody understood. It was it was a field day
for physics. Okay. So and so that this one in
particular led to the first discovery of a particle. Um
So step was who who is playing with this? So
it's a guy named J. J. Thompson, and he was
curious about what these things were and he was like, well,
let's try to you know, poke them. Let's see what
we can do to affect these rays. So the first

(17:43):
thing he did was like, all right, I'm gonna make
my cathode ray and then I'm gonna put the cathode
ray tube inside another electric field. Remember there's already a
little electric field inside. If a cathode and an anode,
you're playing a voltage across it as it makes the rays.
But then he puts that inside and other electric field
to see if he could bend the race. His question
was like, can I move the direction of the rays

(18:05):
by applying an electric field? Because you know, like why not? Right? Yeah,
Like you know you have this is how you do science.
You have a limited number of tools, and you just
try to poke everything you can with those tools and
see if they give you any information. Do you think
that was the first thing he tried? Like did he try?
Was He's sitting around like what if I put a
banana on the beam, or what if I you know,
what if I light a fire under the beam? Or

(18:27):
what if? I think a great question? And I bet,
I bet his his log notebook um contains a bunch
of hilarious stuff. But this is what if I dipped
the capite ray and chocolate. This is the first productive
set of experiments he did. And and what he found
was that if you put another electric field on it,

(18:47):
you can bend the rays. So he instead of just
having straight rays across the tube, he could make the
rays hit the side of the tube instead. WHOA, Like
he was bending the light rays. Like he was bending
this magical glowing ray. Yeah, and it like glows purple
or whatever. And he was bending this ray And that
must have been pretty cool, right because you can turn
up and down the electric field and you can see

(19:09):
the ray bending, and so you're like, wow, I have
power over this ray, you know, And and that's not
something you can do with light, like if you light
a flashlight, that beam is not gonna get band noticeably
or at all by a magnet. Right, that's right. A
magnet or electric field will not change the direction of light.
You can do with a black hole, though, But I
don't think you have went around in your workshop. He

(19:31):
didn't have a black hole. He did not have a
black hole, or I'm sure he would have tried it, right,
dipped the black hole and chocolate, combined the black hole
with bananas. You never knew these rays you could bend,
which was weird. Right, And that told him that they
probably had some electric charge to them, right, that this
wasn't just like neutral light. This was something with special

(19:54):
property to it. Because the only things that have electric charge,
you depositive or negative, get moved by by electric fields. Right.
Everything else just ignores electric fields. So I told him
these rays had some charge to them. So that was
the first hint that they had like some quality. Rather
than being glowing and cool, they carried a charge, meaning
like they prefer or get repelled or attracted by like

(20:17):
the opposite ends of a magnet. Exactly exactly, Okay, So
that this told J. J. Thompson that there was something
to this glow right like it was. It wasn't just
like empty light. There was something to it. Yeah, And
then to confirm that, he did another experiment, which was
he swapped out the electric field for a magnetic field.
And remember, any particle that feels charged will also get

(20:39):
bent by a magnetic field that works a little bit differently,
and so this sort of confirmed to him that there
really was something that that was charged because he could
also bend them. We use the magnetic field. So he
turns the magnetic field on and the rays bend, and
if you use the magnetic field, they also bend. Yes,
they also been with the magnetic field, so bent to
electric field and it been to a magnetic field. So

(21:01):
that really told him that there was something there with charge.
But the real genius of his experiment came in the
next step. What other people had tried this kind of stuff,
but he was the first person to combine the electric
field and the magnetic field at the same time. But
the cool thing about this combining them was that an
electric field bends it based on how much charge it has. Okay,

(21:23):
the magnetic field bends it based on how much charge
it has. And also it's more sensitive to the mass. Right,
So by by measuring how much the electric field bends
it versus how much the magnetic field bends it, you
can measure the ratio of the charge and the mass
of this this ray, this thing. Right, So he's shooting

(21:43):
this particle through the Catherine ray, he's bending it one
way with the electric field, another way with the magnetic field.
He's measuring all that. That lets him know that the
ray has mass, right, that the thing that's inside the
ray that's causing this glow has some mass, And it
lets him measure the ratio of the charge to the mass.
Because like, if something is heavy and has a negative charge,

(22:05):
it will bend one way, but if something is light
and has a negative charge will bend differently. Yeah, it
won't bend as much if it's heavier for example. Okay,
So the stronger the charge, the more the bending. The
higher the mass, the less the bending. And because the
electric field the magnetic field are sensitive in different ways
to these two quantities, he could measure this ratio by

(22:26):
measuring both of those things. So this is like experimental cleverness.
We hear lots of stories in the history of physics
of like theoretical genius, right, moments of insight, but experimental cleverness,
you know, has really paved the way. This is like
people figuring out, how can I solve this puzzle? How
can I make the universe tell me this answer? How
can I arrange things in a way that nature cannot escape? Right?

(22:48):
So I like, can I outclever the universe? Yes, exactly.
It's like being a detective, right, It's like, how can
I prove you know, how can I rule out this alibi?
How can I construct a situation where the suspect has
to reveal to me who is the real killer? Right? Um?
That's experimental cleverness. Um. And the answer he got blew
his mind because he measured this charged mass ratio and

(23:10):
he was enormous, right, the charge which much much, much,
much much bigger than the mass. So he saw that
whatever this ray was, it was supercharged, basically like it
had a huge amount of charge but very little mass, yes, exactly,
And so he was like, wow, whatever this thing is,
there's stuff to it. It has mass, but it also

(23:31):
has charge, but it's got this like way more charged
than it has mass. But that must have been a
kind of mind blowing, right, like, this ray has mass,
like it has substance to it. That was the moment
when particle physics as a concept as a field was
born because he was like, ah ha, now I can

(23:52):
say that this ray is made of something that has
stuff to it, right, And he that's when he took
this first step. He created the concept of the fundamental particle.
And he's like, there's something in there that has both
charge and mass. So it's like a dot in space
that has more than one property, right, And that's sort
of the idea of a particle. It's like, it's just

(24:12):
a point in space that we could put labels on.
But how do you know it wasn't just another atom
or that it was just another like fluid or something. Well,
we knew it wasn't an atom because the atoms are
either neutral or they have positive charge with He didn't
know the structure of matter right at this point, he
didn't know what atoms were made out of. Right, But

(24:32):
no atom had this charge to mass ratio, right. Atoms
were much more massive compared to their charge. So this
is definitely something This is definitely something new because remember
atoms are dominated by protons and neutrons, which are much
much heavier than electrons. Okay, so U and that was
a big deal. Do you think that really kind of
blew his mind that he write like eureka on his notebook? Yeah?

(24:54):
I think that was a great moment. You know, and
other people had tried and failed, mostly because they didn't
have a good in off vacuum in their in their
catholine ray tubes, and so they didn't achieve these these results.
And so you know, he worked carefully, he had some
good ideas, and so he was the first one across
the line. So because he was the first one across
the line, of course he got the right to name

(25:14):
this thing. Right. He created this whole concept of a particle,
and I think it was a mind blowing moment for
him because he thought pretty grandly about it. But I
don't think he'd be very impressed with the name he
All right, well, before we reveal the name of this
first particle, let's take another quick break. Alright, we're talking

(25:45):
about the first particle ever discovered, and we've been talking
about the story of J. J. Thompson, who did some
clever experiments and he found that these rays of glowy
stuff had a lot of large but not a lot
of mass. And so I'm trying to figure out, Daniel,
how this you go from that to like, oh, it

(26:06):
must be little tiny particles. That's basically it, right, he said,
that is what a particle is. It's a point in
space that has some mass and has some charge. And
that's like he knew this was something new. I hadn't
been discovered before, and so he thought, like, I'm gonna
call this thing something. It must be something because it
has some mass to it. You know, these days of

(26:27):
a modern particle physics, right, we don't have to have
mass to have a particle. Sort of generalize the concept
of a particle to just be like a dot in
space that has labels, and those labels can be like
do you have electric charge yes or no? Do you
have quantum color charge? Yes or no? Do you feel
the weak charge? Yes or no? Do you have mass?
Yes or no? Right? Do you have spin? Very various

(26:50):
answers to that, And so we've sort of generalized this
concept of a particle um to be like a dot
in space with various labels. But to my understanding, this
is the first in history when that idea was used, Like,
here's the thing it's an it, and it has a
special property of mass and a special property of charge
that are you know, sort of like labels on it. Yeah.

(27:13):
And and remember he's imagining these rays to be made
up these things of these things, and they're all identical, right,
they all have the same charge to mass ratio. So
it's like this, he's imagining it to be this stream
of little special dots. And so that was the birth
of particle physics. Yeah. Yeah, although he didn't call it
a particle. His talents were in experiments and in cleverness,

(27:34):
but not necessarily in you know, naming things. He and
I would not have been friends. No. He called this
thing that he found the corpus skule. Ah, And I
think corps comes from like, you know, incorporation, not like
a company, but like a like a corpse, you know,
like matter, like like a body, Yes, like a body exactly.

(27:58):
And so I think he was going for like, you know,
corpsito with corpuscule, like a little body, you know, or something.
He had been Italian, the history of physics would have
been totally different, that's right, exactly, or a Spanish or something.
So he called it his corpuscule. So he saw this
weird glow, and he thought, and he figured out that

(28:18):
it has mass and charged and so he imagined that
it must be little tiny things and he called them exactly,
and he called called them corpuscules. And he was pretty
pleased with himself. I mean, it's a pretty big discovery.
And he um, he named this thing. And then he imagined, ah, well,
maybe I haven't just discovered what makes these rays up.
Maybe everything is made of these things. And you know,

(28:41):
there's this tendency in physics when you make a discovery
to generalize it, to think too expansively, to imagine that
maybe you've cracked like a really deep secret in the universe.
And so he imagined that, you know, maybe atoms were
made out of these things, and he had found the
basic building block of the whole universe. He kind of
wasn't that far off, right, Like, in a way, everything

(29:01):
is sort of that we know about is sort of
made out of these corpus schools, corps corpuscuits, that's right.
He was right that the little corpusculitos were boiling off
the cathode, right, and so it was reasonable for him
to imagine that maybe everything had these little corpuscules inside
of them. Of course there's a deeper question there, right, like,

(29:22):
because these things are negative and most matter is neutral,
so you have to answer the question of like, you know,
what's balancing it out. So he imagined that his model
of matter was, you know, basically a bunch of his
little corpus scules and then some like thin positively charged
jelly to fill the universe to balance out those elect

(29:43):
those the negative charges from his little corpuscuit, corpuscule and jelly.
That's right, he was thinking about dessert. Right, Well, let's
not keep our listeners and suspense anymore, Daniel. So this
corpus school is was later renamed into what we all
know and love as the electron. Most of the time

(30:04):
in particle physics, whoever discovers the particle, we give them
the right to name it, and even if it's ridiculous
or silly, we usually keep it. But this one, for
reasons I don't understand, was later renamed and his the
inventor the discoverer's choice of corporate skool was tossed aside.
Oh man, there was like a vote. I don't know,
I have to dig into the history of that. A

(30:26):
little bit like, we love you, j J. But you
got skills, but these aren't them. We love you. But
that's a dumb name, man, And it is a dumb name.
I mean, I'm so I'm glad to be a particle
physicist and not a corpuscule physicist. I don't know. I mean,
is electron really a better name than corpus school? I
mean it sounds kind of corporate skul. It sounds like

(30:47):
a disease or something. I'm sorry, sir, you have corpus
s fueles. I'm gonna prescribe chocolate covered bananas for the
rest of your life. I'm sorry, sir. Every atom in
your body has a bunch of corpus skools, and that
is you're in acted with corpus skules. There's nothing we
can do about it. I'm sorry to be so negative. So, so,

(31:07):
that was the first particle then that was ever discovered
by humans. It was the electron, that's right, yeah, And
and um, And he was right that electrons or corpuscules
as he said them, as he called them, are inside
all of matter, right. Um. He was wrong about the
structure of the atom and and where the positive charges are,
but he was right, that that corpus skules play a
role in matter, and that's pretty cool. Wait wait, I'm

(31:30):
not made out of some positive jelly. I'm positive that
you're not made out of jelly. And you know, to
round it out, we now have a pretty solid modern
understanding of what happens inside cathode ray tubes, right, and
why they why they work, and you know very quickly
they have the You have the cathode on one side
and you heat it up in the electrons boil off,

(31:51):
then they get slurped across by by the electric field
to the other side. But the interesting little nugget there
is that if you have a perfect vacuum, you won't
see any cathode rays. Right. Electrons are not really visible,
they don't glow. The reason that J. J. Thompson saw
raise is because he didn't succeed in making a perfect vacuum.

(32:12):
He still had some gas in there and that gas
was getting ionized by the electrons and it was glowing.
So the cathode rays he was seeing were it actually electrons.
There were glowing gas caused by the electron, Like the
electrons hit the gas and then that's what makes it glow. Yeah, exactly.
So if he had been a better experimentalist and achieved
a better vacuum, he never would have discovered the corpus fuel.

(32:34):
If he had been the first to create a vacuum,
he would he would not have discovered the electron. That's right, exactly.
So it takes a combination of luck, skill, cleverness, and ineptitude.
All right, So that's the first particle ever discovered, the electron,
And I have to say, I think that's the one
I would have guessed, probably the electron. Yeah, because electricity
is sort of immediate and tactile. Why would have electron accessible?

(32:57):
And I just associated with there you know, they need
about lightning and Tesla's coils and things like that. Do
you have like a steampunk image of physics needs? Basically
everything I know is through comics basically, you know what.
That's probably pretty accurate, so I won't dispute it. And

(33:18):
so what do you think would happen if we had
stayed with corpus school, Like would this be my corpus
stronic watch that I'm wearing and I'm listening to Corpus Corona?
I don't know, And I can't even imagine, Like if
we had stuck with that as a sort of precedent,
what would we have named the other particles? You know,
we have to follow, follow the corpse um, the corpse ethos,

(33:42):
the cule pattern, the cels. So that's pretty cool to
think about how things are discovered, you know, like to
imagine not knowing anything about the things around you and
to be the one who comes up with a some
crazy idea or some some crazy experiment that cracks it

(34:02):
all open. As always the case when you look at
the history of science, it seems pretty straightforward, like he
didn't have to have any special materials. The kind of
stuff he had around, lots of people had around. He
just combined it in a sort of unusual way. And
it's easy to look back and think, oh, I would
have done that, But remember back then there were a
lot of things people didn't understand. And having these ideas
and recognizing the significance of the results you have, that's

(34:26):
really where the genius comes in, and and knowing which
experiments to do and what they mean. And so we
should give a lot of credit to J. J. Thompson.
We made a little bit of fun of him, but
he really kicked off this whole field a part of physics,
and so I certainly owe him a lot, right, And
there's still a huge number of things we don't know.
So any one of our listeners out or it could
be the one, could be the next J. J. Thompson

(34:48):
could be the next person to discover something amazing. Yeah,
and maybe with the materials you have in your garage,
just maybe give it a little more thought before you
name it. Just yeah, you do discover new particle, please
call Jorge is very reasonable consulting rates. I work for bananas,
so very reason Alright, alright, thanks for tuning in. Hope

(35:11):
you enjoyed that. See you next time. If you still
have a question after listening to all these explanations, please
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(35:33):
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