June 29, 2010 • 17 mins
Science experiments aren't just for high school students. In the first installment of this special two-part series, Allison and Robert take a look at some of history's most important science experiments. Tune in and learn more in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how
stuff works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is also Adamo, the science editor how stuff works
dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, science writer at
(00:20):
how stuff works dot com. And today we're gonna talk
about a couple of experiments that have props changed the world. Yeah,
these are pretty pretty big ones. Yeah, so worldwide, billions
and billions of dollars or earmarked for scientific research and development.
I looked this up. Turns out in two thousand nine,
the United States government allowed a hundred and fourteen billion
(00:41):
just for research and development awarded to its agencies. So
the various government agencies, as you can imagine. I think
that the dude in the Riddler costume on those infomercials
told me this. Yeah, a lot of that money went
to the Department of Defense. As you met, it always
helps if you can kill somebody with your science experiment,
no doubt. And then little less than half of that
(01:01):
was split between basic research, so they're kind that's driven
by scientific curiosity or interest in a particular scientific question,
and then applied research, the kind of research the designed
to solve practical problems, right, yeah, like some of some
of the stuff that goes on, it's just really cool. Like, um,
I was doing a news article several months back about
research into how hammerhead sharks seek and yes, government was
(01:23):
flipping the bill for a lot of that, and I
have yet to come up with a way that that
could be used to kill somebody or really do anything
other than understand hammer heads. Right, So I was bringing
up those numbers just to illustrate how many experiments are
going on right now, a lot of which we will
never ever know about, a lot of which won't get
picked up in the New England Journal of Medicine. So
we decided to highlight a few that particularly stand up.
(01:46):
So we're doing a series, the two part series, in
which we highlight a couple of our favorite experiments with
the big guns. Here we're talking, yeah, our first one's Darwin. Yeah,
and I should mention in a few instances we're gonna
talk about too closely related experiment. It's as opposed to
one single experiment, just because, as you guys know, science
stands on the shoulder of giants, so it's hard to
(02:07):
sometimes separate out who did what when, and sometimes it's
like a short person standing on the shoulder of a giant,
and then there's another giant standing on top of the
short person. But if you get the short person out
of the mix, then it all falls apart. It's like singer,
that's true feet Yeah, except Jinga with giants. Yeah. Right,
So who's the first nominee? Charles Darwin? All right, let's
talk about Darwin. Darwin's flowers. Um, don't you mean Darwin's
(02:31):
Galapagos Islands trip. Um, No, you don't mean flowers. No,
that was this is kind of this kind of came
later because the Galapagos Island's trip is famous because you know,
he was always looking at birds and and he you know,
really putting together you know, all the the the data
that would lead to origin of species and uh but
but after all that, you know, it's like the theories
(02:52):
out there and it's you know, not popular with everybody.
It's still needs a lot of support, and he has
his supporters, but there's also plenty of people just like
making fun of him and drawing and really mean cartoons. Yeah,
he was and he was of a divisive character for sure,
and he didn't want to be actually, no, he hated it.
We we have a I think a really good article
on the man I wrote that one um. But he
(03:16):
was having to he was he retreated from the public
cup eye and let other people handle the pr stuff,
and he went back to experiments. See what did he
do well? He started looking into um orchids and uh
and their pollinators. So he's looking to reinforce the theory
of natural selection, right, because this boils down to um.
(03:40):
You know, you look at at some of the crazy
like orchids and flowers out there and and they'll be
just be some there's such a variety of design um
in them. And then somewhere out there in the world
there's a there's an insect that's that's it's custom evolved
to pollinate that one particular flower. Right. That was his thought, Yeah,
(04:02):
that was that was his thoughts. So he started, like,
you know, if he were round the day, he'd make
a spreadsheet of this, you know, like which which flowers
line up with which pollinators? Right, take the Star of
Bethlehem orchid for example. Um it's an orchid that stores
nectar near the bottom of a tube up to twelve
inches long. So Darwin saw this design and he predicted
that there was a matching animal outfit somewhere out there
(04:23):
in the where there's there's one insect that's made to
take care of this. So sure enough, in three scientists
discovered that the hawk moth sported along probiscus or knows,
essentially uniquely suited to reach the bottom of this particular
orchids nectar tube. So this was good because again it
was providing evidence for his theory of natural selection. Um,
(04:45):
you know, it's giving credence to on the origin of
species and just generally bolstering the modern framework of evolution
as we know it with flowers. Yeah, so let's do
another biology one. Let's talk about DNA. Oh yeah, this
is a big one as well. Watson and right, Yeah, well,
Watson and critic and all the headlines and lots of
school kids. Certainly no James Watson and Francis Crick as
(05:07):
the guys who unlocked the mystery of DNA but there
are a whole lot of other players involved in the mix.
So that nineteen sixty two Nobel Prize in Medicine was
split among Watson, Creek, and Maurice Hugh Wilkins. These are
the guys who figured out the molecular structure of DNA,
along with the help of more than a few scientists
like Hershei and Chase. Right, so, back in nineteen fifty two,
(05:30):
Elfin Hershei and Martha Chase were conducting this now famous
blender experiment that identified DNA as a molecule responsible for heredity,
no small feet, and Hershiean. Chase's research prompted a bunch
of scientists to decipher DNA's molecular structure. Like it was
just like the scientific sort of gold rush. Instead of
(05:50):
focusing on goal, they were focusing on doxy ribonucleic acid.
I like to think that each duo of scientists was
like like a cop duo, where one was the good
cop when it was a bad cop, so like Watson
a crick or like like once taking the strong arm
with the DNA and the other just like bringing up coffee.
Did you ever see the TV movie about this, The
Race for the Double Helix a k A Life Story?
(06:12):
I think it. It was a BBC production and I'm
surprised you have not seen it because Jeff Goldbloom was
in it. WHOA really? Oh man, I bet he's He's
awesome and a little crazy in it. Yeah, I forget
which one he was, Watson or Creek, but I must
have seen that back in the day, because whenever I
think of DNA and stuff, I always think of gold
Bloom and I can never think why, And now I
know it was. Are you sure you weren't thinking about
(06:34):
the fly where? Because there's a lot of DNA stuff
in there right right, The fly and the race for
the double helix. That's the movie. I based my understanding
of DNA on. So Prize winner Wilkins, along with this
colleague Rosalind Franklin, who did not win the DNA Nobel Prize,
which is a whole separate but interesting story, use this
technique called X ray to fraction to study DNA. And
(06:55):
we're going to talk about this technique a little later
on too with you Robert. Right, So, the technique basically
involves shooting X rays at in this case a line
fibers have purified DNA. Yeah. The idea is when X
rays travel through something, they're going to get defracted and
come theither side. But they get diffracted, they get moved
around and alter, and there's't they can tell you what
(07:18):
it just passed through. It's kind of like when you
and in a very there's a very broad example, but
it's like when you get an X ray made of
your tooth, the you know, at the dentist office. Um,
we're in a back alley, you know. But the the
X rays passed through your teeth and and onto that
little film, right, so, and and then they give your
(07:41):
information about about what happened, Yeah, between cavities exactly. Yeah.
So yeah, in this case, the diffracted X rays form
a pattern that's unique to the molecul in question, and
in this case it was d N A and so
Rosalind Franklin's now famous photo of DNA shows this X
shaped pattern. Of course, you have to know how to
interpret that pattern to quote unquote see the molecule, and
(08:02):
Watson and Crick did so. Watson and kriicknew that the
photo represented the signature of a helical molecule, and they
also figured out the width of the helicks by analyzing
Franklin's image, and DNA was somewhat decoded. Yeah. The rest
is history, and we have the image of the double
helix everywhere, and we fully understand everything that DNA can
do now, right, Yeah, yeah, we got it, We got
it down. So let's look at another world changing biology
(08:26):
type experiment that we like. Oh yeah, yeah, this one,
this one was really cool. And this one has to
do with vaccinations, um and the eradication of smallpox. Right, so,
until recently, smallpox is a pretty serious public health problem,
all right. So then this said, there was this British
chef physician by the name of Edward Jenner, and uh
round he started, uh noticing that dairy maids would catch
(08:49):
something called cow pox. What is Jenner doing noticing the
dairy maids is one question? Well, probably pretty cute. Yeah,
they're pretty cute, cute gals, and and they were they
were catching some sort of pox from this this cow
pox from the cows and uh and you know they
suffered through that. But then after they've had cow pox,
they're immune to smallpox. Really. Yeah, So he started studying
(09:11):
this phenomenon, hanging out with more and more dairy maids.
You know, cow pox is still around, so it's beaver pox.
I've not heard of beaver I just made that one up.
I'm kidding, there's no beaver pox. So eventually Jenner decided
to see if he could um, if he could transfer
immunity to smallpox by infecting someone with cow pox on purpose.
(09:33):
So he found, uh, this little boy by the name
of James Phipps. Okay, what did James Phipps parents make
of this? By the way, those are kind of good
old days of human experimentation. Yeah, because I mean it
gets kind of ground because the way he decided to
to to essentially vaccinate him that we didn't really know
it was gonna work, you know, it was still an
(09:53):
experimental phase. Was he made cuts on the boy's arms
and then inserted some fluid from the cow pox source
of a local dairymaid that he was hanging out with
named Sarah Sarah Elms. And so the kid uh contracted
cow pox and then recovered and was then immune to smallpox. Right, So,
forty eight days later, Jenner said, okay, you had your
(10:15):
cow pox cuts, let's see what you're going to do
a smallpox And sure enough he exposed him and he
found out that the boy was immune, proving gender's theory correct.
Fast forward, uh a little while, and uh there's no
more you know, and then you have a powerful small
pox vaccine going on. So pretty cool. So let's talk
(10:35):
a little chemistry. Although the scientists at the center of
our next experiment. Considered himself a physicist, not a chemist.
He was the man who once said, have you heard
this quote? All science is either physics or stamp collecting,
and he was talking about the scientific method. I assume
I had not heard that quote. So the man in
question is Ernest Rutherford, and he's a pretty amazing guy.
(10:57):
He's born in New Zealand. He's one of twelve children.
That's a large, large New Zealand family, or any family.
He's the guy who came up with listen to this.
He's a guy who came up with the principles of alpha,
beta and gamme rays, the proton, the newtron, half lift,
and daughter Adams. One guy came up with all that.
Quite a role. Yeah, I've heard him called the father
(11:18):
of nuclear physics, and that's seems appropriate enough. And future
biggie's like Neils Bore Oppenheimer and James Chadwick, I'll looked
to him for guidance. But we're going to talk about
one of his adventures with the atomic nucleus and revealing
the structure of the atom. So let's talk about the
what Rutherford was doing. Basically, he's carrying off a kind
(11:39):
of a simple experiment, and uh and one that you
can you can you can reproduce at home. All you
need is what a You need an alpha ray emitter
or some sort of like alpha ray gun. Right, You
need some gold foil. Yeah, and you need a scentilator.
What's that, Well, scentilator is essentially back in the day,
it was a screen coated with stink soul fund and
(12:00):
it helps you to figure out where the particles were
going after you fired them, after after you fired them. Okay,
well that maybe a little hard to get a hold off,
but still these are the main elements of the experiment.
So let's talk about the experiment. It was also called
the Geiger Marsden experiment, named after a Hans Geiger gold
foil experiment though sounds. So here's what they did. They
(12:22):
got a source of radioactive particles, like Robert was just
leading to. They fired them through these really thin foils
like gold, and by thin we mean one or two
atoms thick, super super super thin, and they encircled their
whole set up with aforementioned detecting screen, the scintillator, the
screen that was gonna tell them where the particles were going.
After they fired them. So what Rutherford and Cove figured
(12:43):
out was that most of the radioactive particles were actually
firing straight through the foil. Okay, that makes sense. And
then a few of the particles were being deflected at
at a smaller angle, and then a very tiny portion
of the particles were being reflected back at a large angle.
And like we were saying earlier, the deflection tell us
that there's something going on inside the material that they're
(13:06):
that they're passing through. Right. So Rutherford, Geiger, and Marsden
took that to me and that there was a lot
of quote unquote empty space and atoms allowing all those
radioactive particles to pass straight through to the particle screen
or to the the scintillator. But it was the sharp
deflections that intrigued them the most. And so their conclusion
was that there was a strong positive charge at the
(13:27):
heart of the gold atoms that was deflecting those particles
almost straight back toward the source. And he called this
strong positive source that was doing the deflection the nucleus,
And he said the nucleus must be small compared to
the atoms overall size, otherwise more you would have had
more particles bouncing back right. So yeah, so he basically
met the inside of the atom. So today we still
(13:47):
visualized atom as Rutherford did, a small positively charged nucleus
surrounded by a vast firstly populated region with a couple
of electrons. Wow, so you can you can really tell
a lot about something by firing some radiation through it.
It's such a simple experiment, but it's so brilliant. It
is brilliant. Right. So we mentioned X ray diffraction a
little bit earlier. When we're talking about DNA, we're talking
(14:09):
about Rosalind Franklin and her X ray defraction studies. But
as we pointed out, her work wrote a lot to
Dorothy Krowfet Hodgkin. She was one of only three women
ever to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Hodgkin
was pretty darn good at X ray diffraction, so it's
not really surprising that she eventually revealed the structure of
pretty much one of medicine's most important chemicals, penicillin. Indeed,
(14:34):
so back in Alexander Fleming had discovered the bacteria killing substance,
but scientists had a really hard time purifying the chemical
in order to develop an effective treatment. So what Hodgkin
did was she mapped out the three D arrangement of
penicillin's atoms, and essentially she opened all these new avenues
for creating and developing semisynthetic derivatives of penicillin. Yeah, it's
(14:57):
like when hackers like break the code for something like
DVD encryption, you know, so that they can rip it.
It's like like, here was something that was really important
to his penicillin, and in in fact she allowed us
to crack it do more with it, right, but telling
us all that stuff about the molecular structures she helped
out a lot. And in this case what she did
was after two different companies center penicillin crystals, Hodgkin pass
(15:21):
those X ray waves through the crystals and allowed the
radiation to strike this photographic plate. We did cover this
a little bit before, so as the X rays interacted
with the electrons in those sample there to fracked and
reveals the interstructure excellent. And then she went on to
deal with other structures, right, like vitamin B twelve she did,
she did, and yeah, penicillin was indeed the big one,
(15:44):
and of course she she won the Nobel PRIs in
Chemistry unshared in which is a big deal. Usually they're
scientists selfish. I don't know about that. So wow, those
are those are some world changing experiments right there. I
feel a little change just talking of Um, I feel inspired. Yeah,
I hope there are some world changing experiments going on
(16:04):
right now. I'm gonna fire some radiation through some stuff
just to see what's going on. We need to get
back to your desk. Yeah, yeah, what's going on in
that cup of coffee. Well, the thing is, if you're
inspired by our world changing experiments, be sure to listen
to part two because we've got more of these coming up.
And um, and there's gonna be the last radiation passing
through things in that one. So if you want is
(16:25):
endo that in this this podcast, then there's gonna be
less next time. Yeah, we're going to get into some
cool stuff like determining the speed of light. Yeah, primordial
suite dogs, all sorts of good stuff. Right. So, if
you want to go to the home page and look
up some cool experiments in the meantime, just type in
science experiments and you'll get ten science experiments to change
the world. Also, check out our blog where we update
(16:48):
you on all sorts of cool things going on involving say,
the world of energy and uh and hey Twitter, Facebook,
We're on there as well. Lab stuff on Twitter, lab
stuff or stuff in the Science Lab on face. Look.
If you guys want to talk science, we're there for you. Yes,
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(17:08):
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house stuff works dot com home page
Yeah, welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how
stuff works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is also Adamo, the science editor how stuff works
dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, science writer at
(00:20):
how stuff works dot com. And today we're gonna talk
about a couple of experiments that have props changed the world. Yeah,
these are pretty pretty big ones. Yeah, so worldwide, billions
and billions of dollars or earmarked for scientific research and development.
I looked this up. Turns out in two thousand nine,
the United States government allowed a hundred and fourteen billion
(00:41):
just for research and development awarded to its agencies. So
the various government agencies, as you can imagine. I think
that the dude in the Riddler costume on those infomercials
told me this. Yeah, a lot of that money went
to the Department of Defense. As you met, it always
helps if you can kill somebody with your science experiment,
no doubt. And then little less than half of that
(01:01):
was split between basic research, so they're kind that's driven
by scientific curiosity or interest in a particular scientific question,
and then applied research, the kind of research the designed
to solve practical problems, right, yeah, like some of some
of the stuff that goes on, it's just really cool. Like, um,
I was doing a news article several months back about
research into how hammerhead sharks seek and yes, government was
(01:23):
flipping the bill for a lot of that, and I
have yet to come up with a way that that
could be used to kill somebody or really do anything
other than understand hammer heads. Right, So I was bringing
up those numbers just to illustrate how many experiments are
going on right now, a lot of which we will
never ever know about, a lot of which won't get
picked up in the New England Journal of Medicine. So
we decided to highlight a few that particularly stand up.
(01:46):
So we're doing a series, the two part series, in
which we highlight a couple of our favorite experiments with
the big guns. Here we're talking, yeah, our first one's Darwin. Yeah,
and I should mention in a few instances we're gonna
talk about too closely related experiment. It's as opposed to
one single experiment, just because, as you guys know, science
stands on the shoulder of giants, so it's hard to
(02:07):
sometimes separate out who did what when, and sometimes it's
like a short person standing on the shoulder of a giant,
and then there's another giant standing on top of the
short person. But if you get the short person out
of the mix, then it all falls apart. It's like singer,
that's true feet Yeah, except Jinga with giants. Yeah. Right,
So who's the first nominee? Charles Darwin? All right, let's
talk about Darwin. Darwin's flowers. Um, don't you mean Darwin's
(02:31):
Galapagos Islands trip. Um, No, you don't mean flowers. No,
that was this is kind of this kind of came
later because the Galapagos Island's trip is famous because you know,
he was always looking at birds and and he you know,
really putting together you know, all the the the data
that would lead to origin of species and uh but
but after all that, you know, it's like the theories
(02:52):
out there and it's you know, not popular with everybody.
It's still needs a lot of support, and he has
his supporters, but there's also plenty of people just like
making fun of him and drawing and really mean cartoons. Yeah,
he was and he was of a divisive character for sure,
and he didn't want to be actually, no, he hated it.
We we have a I think a really good article
on the man I wrote that one um. But he
(03:16):
was having to he was he retreated from the public
cup eye and let other people handle the pr stuff,
and he went back to experiments. See what did he
do well? He started looking into um orchids and uh
and their pollinators. So he's looking to reinforce the theory
of natural selection, right, because this boils down to um.
(03:40):
You know, you look at at some of the crazy
like orchids and flowers out there and and they'll be
just be some there's such a variety of design um
in them. And then somewhere out there in the world
there's a there's an insect that's that's it's custom evolved
to pollinate that one particular flower. Right. That was his thought, Yeah,
(04:02):
that was that was his thoughts. So he started, like,
you know, if he were round the day, he'd make
a spreadsheet of this, you know, like which which flowers
line up with which pollinators? Right, take the Star of
Bethlehem orchid for example. Um it's an orchid that stores
nectar near the bottom of a tube up to twelve
inches long. So Darwin saw this design and he predicted
that there was a matching animal outfit somewhere out there
(04:23):
in the where there's there's one insect that's made to
take care of this. So sure enough, in three scientists
discovered that the hawk moth sported along probiscus or knows,
essentially uniquely suited to reach the bottom of this particular
orchids nectar tube. So this was good because again it
was providing evidence for his theory of natural selection. Um,
(04:45):
you know, it's giving credence to on the origin of
species and just generally bolstering the modern framework of evolution
as we know it with flowers. Yeah, so let's do
another biology one. Let's talk about DNA. Oh yeah, this
is a big one as well. Watson and right, Yeah, well,
Watson and critic and all the headlines and lots of
school kids. Certainly no James Watson and Francis Crick as
(05:07):
the guys who unlocked the mystery of DNA but there
are a whole lot of other players involved in the mix.
So that nineteen sixty two Nobel Prize in Medicine was
split among Watson, Creek, and Maurice Hugh Wilkins. These are
the guys who figured out the molecular structure of DNA,
along with the help of more than a few scientists
like Hershei and Chase. Right, so, back in nineteen fifty two,
(05:30):
Elfin Hershei and Martha Chase were conducting this now famous
blender experiment that identified DNA as a molecule responsible for heredity,
no small feet, and Hershiean. Chase's research prompted a bunch
of scientists to decipher DNA's molecular structure. Like it was
just like the scientific sort of gold rush. Instead of
(05:50):
focusing on goal, they were focusing on doxy ribonucleic acid.
I like to think that each duo of scientists was
like like a cop duo, where one was the good
cop when it was a bad cop, so like Watson
a crick or like like once taking the strong arm
with the DNA and the other just like bringing up coffee.
Did you ever see the TV movie about this, The
Race for the Double Helix a k A Life Story?
(06:12):
I think it. It was a BBC production and I'm
surprised you have not seen it because Jeff Goldbloom was
in it. WHOA really? Oh man, I bet he's He's
awesome and a little crazy in it. Yeah, I forget
which one he was, Watson or Creek, but I must
have seen that back in the day, because whenever I
think of DNA and stuff, I always think of gold
Bloom and I can never think why, And now I
know it was. Are you sure you weren't thinking about
(06:34):
the fly where? Because there's a lot of DNA stuff
in there right right, The fly and the race for
the double helix. That's the movie. I based my understanding
of DNA on. So Prize winner Wilkins, along with this
colleague Rosalind Franklin, who did not win the DNA Nobel Prize,
which is a whole separate but interesting story, use this
technique called X ray to fraction to study DNA. And
(06:55):
we're going to talk about this technique a little later
on too with you Robert. Right, So, the technique basically
involves shooting X rays at in this case a line
fibers have purified DNA. Yeah. The idea is when X
rays travel through something, they're going to get defracted and
come theither side. But they get diffracted, they get moved
around and alter, and there's't they can tell you what
(07:18):
it just passed through. It's kind of like when you
and in a very there's a very broad example, but
it's like when you get an X ray made of
your tooth, the you know, at the dentist office. Um,
we're in a back alley, you know. But the the
X rays passed through your teeth and and onto that
little film, right, so, and and then they give your
(07:41):
information about about what happened, Yeah, between cavities exactly. Yeah.
So yeah, in this case, the diffracted X rays form
a pattern that's unique to the molecul in question, and
in this case it was d N A and so
Rosalind Franklin's now famous photo of DNA shows this X
shaped pattern. Of course, you have to know how to
interpret that pattern to quote unquote see the molecule, and
(08:02):
Watson and Crick did so. Watson and kriicknew that the
photo represented the signature of a helical molecule, and they
also figured out the width of the helicks by analyzing
Franklin's image, and DNA was somewhat decoded. Yeah. The rest
is history, and we have the image of the double
helix everywhere, and we fully understand everything that DNA can
do now, right, Yeah, yeah, we got it, We got
it down. So let's look at another world changing biology
(08:26):
type experiment that we like. Oh yeah, yeah, this one,
this one was really cool. And this one has to
do with vaccinations, um and the eradication of smallpox. Right, so,
until recently, smallpox is a pretty serious public health problem,
all right. So then this said, there was this British
chef physician by the name of Edward Jenner, and uh
round he started, uh noticing that dairy maids would catch
(08:49):
something called cow pox. What is Jenner doing noticing the
dairy maids is one question? Well, probably pretty cute. Yeah,
they're pretty cute, cute gals, and and they were they
were catching some sort of pox from this this cow
pox from the cows and uh and you know they
suffered through that. But then after they've had cow pox,
they're immune to smallpox. Really. Yeah, So he started studying
(09:11):
this phenomenon, hanging out with more and more dairy maids.
You know, cow pox is still around, so it's beaver pox.
I've not heard of beaver I just made that one up.
I'm kidding, there's no beaver pox. So eventually Jenner decided
to see if he could um, if he could transfer
immunity to smallpox by infecting someone with cow pox on purpose.
(09:33):
So he found, uh, this little boy by the name
of James Phipps. Okay, what did James Phipps parents make
of this? By the way, those are kind of good
old days of human experimentation. Yeah, because I mean it
gets kind of ground because the way he decided to
to to essentially vaccinate him that we didn't really know
it was gonna work, you know, it was still an
(09:53):
experimental phase. Was he made cuts on the boy's arms
and then inserted some fluid from the cow pox source
of a local dairymaid that he was hanging out with
named Sarah Sarah Elms. And so the kid uh contracted
cow pox and then recovered and was then immune to smallpox. Right, So,
forty eight days later, Jenner said, okay, you had your
(10:15):
cow pox cuts, let's see what you're going to do
a smallpox And sure enough he exposed him and he
found out that the boy was immune, proving gender's theory correct.
Fast forward, uh a little while, and uh there's no
more you know, and then you have a powerful small
pox vaccine going on. So pretty cool. So let's talk
(10:35):
a little chemistry. Although the scientists at the center of
our next experiment. Considered himself a physicist, not a chemist.
He was the man who once said, have you heard
this quote? All science is either physics or stamp collecting,
and he was talking about the scientific method. I assume
I had not heard that quote. So the man in
question is Ernest Rutherford, and he's a pretty amazing guy.
(10:57):
He's born in New Zealand. He's one of twelve children.
That's a large, large New Zealand family, or any family.
He's the guy who came up with listen to this.
He's a guy who came up with the principles of alpha,
beta and gamme rays, the proton, the newtron, half lift,
and daughter Adams. One guy came up with all that.
Quite a role. Yeah, I've heard him called the father
(11:18):
of nuclear physics, and that's seems appropriate enough. And future
biggie's like Neils Bore Oppenheimer and James Chadwick, I'll looked
to him for guidance. But we're going to talk about
one of his adventures with the atomic nucleus and revealing
the structure of the atom. So let's talk about the
what Rutherford was doing. Basically, he's carrying off a kind
(11:39):
of a simple experiment, and uh and one that you
can you can you can reproduce at home. All you
need is what a You need an alpha ray emitter
or some sort of like alpha ray gun. Right, You
need some gold foil. Yeah, and you need a scentilator.
What's that, Well, scentilator is essentially back in the day,
it was a screen coated with stink soul fund and
(12:00):
it helps you to figure out where the particles were
going after you fired them, after after you fired them. Okay,
well that maybe a little hard to get a hold off,
but still these are the main elements of the experiment.
So let's talk about the experiment. It was also called
the Geiger Marsden experiment, named after a Hans Geiger gold
foil experiment though sounds. So here's what they did. They
(12:22):
got a source of radioactive particles, like Robert was just
leading to. They fired them through these really thin foils
like gold, and by thin we mean one or two
atoms thick, super super super thin, and they encircled their
whole set up with aforementioned detecting screen, the scintillator, the
screen that was gonna tell them where the particles were going.
After they fired them. So what Rutherford and Cove figured
(12:43):
out was that most of the radioactive particles were actually
firing straight through the foil. Okay, that makes sense. And
then a few of the particles were being deflected at
at a smaller angle, and then a very tiny portion
of the particles were being reflected back at a large angle.
And like we were saying earlier, the deflection tell us
that there's something going on inside the material that they're
(13:06):
that they're passing through. Right. So Rutherford, Geiger, and Marsden
took that to me and that there was a lot
of quote unquote empty space and atoms allowing all those
radioactive particles to pass straight through to the particle screen
or to the the scintillator. But it was the sharp
deflections that intrigued them the most. And so their conclusion
was that there was a strong positive charge at the
(13:27):
heart of the gold atoms that was deflecting those particles
almost straight back toward the source. And he called this
strong positive source that was doing the deflection the nucleus,
And he said the nucleus must be small compared to
the atoms overall size, otherwise more you would have had
more particles bouncing back right. So yeah, so he basically
met the inside of the atom. So today we still
(13:47):
visualized atom as Rutherford did, a small positively charged nucleus
surrounded by a vast firstly populated region with a couple
of electrons. Wow, so you can you can really tell
a lot about something by firing some radiation through it.
It's such a simple experiment, but it's so brilliant. It
is brilliant. Right. So we mentioned X ray diffraction a
little bit earlier. When we're talking about DNA, we're talking
(14:09):
about Rosalind Franklin and her X ray defraction studies. But
as we pointed out, her work wrote a lot to
Dorothy Krowfet Hodgkin. She was one of only three women
ever to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Hodgkin
was pretty darn good at X ray diffraction, so it's
not really surprising that she eventually revealed the structure of
pretty much one of medicine's most important chemicals, penicillin. Indeed,
(14:34):
so back in Alexander Fleming had discovered the bacteria killing substance,
but scientists had a really hard time purifying the chemical
in order to develop an effective treatment. So what Hodgkin
did was she mapped out the three D arrangement of
penicillin's atoms, and essentially she opened all these new avenues
for creating and developing semisynthetic derivatives of penicillin. Yeah, it's
(14:57):
like when hackers like break the code for something like
DVD encryption, you know, so that they can rip it.
It's like like, here was something that was really important
to his penicillin, and in in fact she allowed us
to crack it do more with it, right, but telling
us all that stuff about the molecular structures she helped
out a lot. And in this case what she did
was after two different companies center penicillin crystals, Hodgkin pass
(15:21):
those X ray waves through the crystals and allowed the
radiation to strike this photographic plate. We did cover this
a little bit before, so as the X rays interacted
with the electrons in those sample there to fracked and
reveals the interstructure excellent. And then she went on to
deal with other structures, right, like vitamin B twelve she did,
she did, and yeah, penicillin was indeed the big one,
(15:44):
and of course she she won the Nobel PRIs in
Chemistry unshared in which is a big deal. Usually they're
scientists selfish. I don't know about that. So wow, those
are those are some world changing experiments right there. I
feel a little change just talking of Um, I feel inspired. Yeah,
I hope there are some world changing experiments going on
(16:04):
right now. I'm gonna fire some radiation through some stuff
just to see what's going on. We need to get
back to your desk. Yeah, yeah, what's going on in
that cup of coffee. Well, the thing is, if you're
inspired by our world changing experiments, be sure to listen
to part two because we've got more of these coming up.
And um, and there's gonna be the last radiation passing
through things in that one. So if you want is
(16:25):
endo that in this this podcast, then there's gonna be
less next time. Yeah, we're going to get into some
cool stuff like determining the speed of light. Yeah, primordial
suite dogs, all sorts of good stuff. Right. So, if
you want to go to the home page and look
up some cool experiments in the meantime, just type in
science experiments and you'll get ten science experiments to change
the world. Also, check out our blog where we update
(16:48):
you on all sorts of cool things going on involving say,
the world of energy and uh and hey Twitter, Facebook,
We're on there as well. Lab stuff on Twitter, lab
stuff or stuff in the Science Lab on face. Look.
If you guys want to talk science, we're there for you. Yes,
sign up at us, interact with us, send us an
(17:08):
email at science stuff at how stuff dot com. Thanks
for listening, guys. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, does it how stuff works dot com. Want
more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
house stuff works dot com home page
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