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Ronald W. Gurney
Ronald Wilfred (or Wilfrid) Gurney (1898– 14 April 1953) was a British theoretical physicist and research pupil of William Lawrence Bragg at the Victoria University of Manchester during the 1920s and 1930s, Bristol University during the 1930s and later in the US, where he died in New York City. He was born in Cheltenham in 1898. Radioactive decay processes Whilst at the Palmer Physical Laboratory at Princeton University from 1926 to 1928, he discovered alpha decay via quantum tunnelling, together with Edward Condon and independently of George Gamow. In the early 1900s, radioactive materials were known to have characteristic exponential decay rates or half lives. At the same time, radiation emissions were known to have certain characteristic energies. By 1928, Gamow had solved the theory of the alpha decay of a nucleus via quantum tunnelling and the problem was also solved independently by Gurney and Condon. Books *''Elementary quantum mechanics'', Cambridge ng.The University P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theoretical Physicist
Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experimental tools to probe these phenomena. The advancement of science generally depends on the interplay between experimental studies and theory. In some cases, theoretical physics adheres to standards of mathematical rigour while giving little weight to experiments and observations.There is some debate as to whether or not theoretical physics uses mathematics to build intuition and illustrativeness to extract physical insight (especially when normal experience fails), rather than as a tool in formalizing theories. This links to the question of it using mathematics in a less formally rigorous, and more intuitive or heuristic way than, say, mathematical physics. For example, while developing special relativity, Albert Einstein was concerned wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Eduard Bethe (; ; July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German-American physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.James C. Keck Collected Works and Biography () has the class notes taken by one of Bethe's students at Cornell from the graduate courses on Nuclear Physics and on Applications of Quantum Mechanics he taught in the spring of 1947. In 1931, Bethe developed the Bethe ansatz, which is a method for finding the exact solutions for the Eigenvalue, eigenvalues and Eigenvector, eigenvectors of certain one-dimensional quantum many-body models. In 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alumni Of The Victoria University Of Manchester
Alumni (: alumnus () or alumna ()) are former students or graduates of a school, college, or university. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for groups of women, and alums (: alum) or alumns (: alumn) as gender-neutral alternatives. The word comes from Latin, meaning nurslings, pupils or foster children, derived from "to nourish". The term is not synonymous with "graduates": people can be alumni without graduating, e.g. Burt Reynolds was an alumnus of Florida State University but did not graduate. The term is sometimes used to refer to former employees, former members of an organization, former contributors, or former inmates. Etymology The Latin noun means "foster son" or "pupil". It is derived from the Latin verb "to nourish". Separate, but from the same root, is the adjective "nourishing", found in the phrase ''alma mater'', a title for a person's home university. Usage in Roman law In Latin, is a legal term (Roman law) to describe a child placed in fosterag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Academics Of The University Of Bristol , a person who is a researcher or has expertise in an academic discipline
{{Disambiguation ...
Academic means of or related to an academy, an institution learning. Academic or academics may also refer to: * Academic staff, or faculty, teachers or research staff * school of philosophers associated with the Platonic Academy in ancient Greece * The Academic, Irish indie rock band * "Academic", song by New Order from the 2015 album ''Music Complete'' Other uses *Academia (other) *Academy (other) *Faculty (other) *Scholar A scholar is a person who is a researcher or has expertise in an academic discipline. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researcher at a university. An academic usually holds an advanced degree or a termina ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1953 Deaths
Events January * January 6 – The Asian Socialist Conference opens in Rangoon, Burma. * January 12 – Estonian émigrés found a Estonian government-in-exile, government-in-exile in Oslo. * January 14 ** Marshal Josip Broz Tito is chosen President of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia. ** The Central Intelligence Agency, CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel first meets to discuss the Unidentified flying object, UFO phenomenon. * January 15 ** Georg Dertinger, foreign minister of East Germany, is arrested for spying. ** British security forces in West Germany arrest 7 members of the Naumann Circle, a clandestine Neo-Nazi organization. * January 19 – 71.1% of all television sets in the United States are tuned into ''I Love Lucy'', to watch Lucy give birth to Little Ricky, which is more people than those who tune into Dwight Eisenhower's inauguration the next day. This record is never broken. * January 24 ** Mau Mau Uprising: Rebels in Kenya kill th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1898 Births
Events January * January 1 – New York City annexes land from surrounding counties, creating the City of Greater New York as the world's second largest. The city is geographically divided into five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island. * January 13 – Novelist Émile Zola's open letter to the President of the French Republic on the Dreyfus affair, , is published on the front page of the Paris daily newspaper , accusing the government of wrongfully imprisoning Alfred Dreyfus and of antisemitism. February * February 12 – The automobile belonging to Henry Lindfield of Brighton rolls out of control down a hill in Purley, London, England, and hits a tree; thus he becomes the world's first fatality from an automobile accident on a public highway. * February 15 – Spanish–American War: The explodes and sinks in Havana Harbor, Cuba, for reasons never fully established, killing 266 men. The event precipitates the United States' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gamow Factor
The Gamow factor, Sommerfeld factor or Gamow–Sommerfeld factor, named after physicists George Gamow or after Arnold Sommerfeld, is a probability factor for two nuclear particles' chance of overcoming the Coulomb barrier in order to undergo nuclear reactions, for example in nuclear fusion. By classical physics, there is almost no possibility for protons to fuse by crossing each other's Coulomb barrier at temperatures commonly observed to cause fusion, such as those found in the Sun. In 1927 it was discovered that there is a significant chance for nuclear fusion due to quantum tunnelling. While the probability of overcoming the Coulomb barrier increases rapidly with increasing particle energy, for a given temperature, the probability of a particle having such an energy falls off very fast, as described by the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. Gamow found that, taken together, these effects mean that for any given temperature, the particles that fuse are mostly in a temperature-dep ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gurney Equations
The Gurney equations are a set of mathematical formulas used in explosives engineering to relate how fast an explosive will accelerate an adjacent layer of metal or other material when the explosive detonates. This determines how fast fragments are released by military explosives, how quickly shaped charge explosives accelerate their liners inwards, and in other calculations such as explosive welding where explosives force two metal sheets together and bond them. The equations were first developed in the 1940s by Ronald Gurney and have been expanded on and added to significantly since that time. The original paper by Gurney analyzed the situation of an exploding shell or bomb, a mass of explosives surrounded by a solid shell. Other researchers have extended similar methods of analysis to other geometries. All of the equations derived based on Gurney's methods are collectively called "Gurney equations". Underlying physics When an explosive adjacent to a layer of a metallic o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nevill Francis Mott
Sir Nevill Francis Mott (30 September 1905 – 8 August 1996) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors. The award was shared with Philip W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck. The three had conducted loosely related research. Mott and Anderson clarified the reasons why magnetic or amorphous materials can sometimes be metallic and sometimes insulating. Education and early life Mott was born in Leeds to Charles Francis Mott and Lilian Mary Reynolds, a granddaughter of Sir John Richardson, and great granddaughter of Sir John Henry Pelly, 1st Baronet. Miss Reynolds was a Cambridge Mathematics Tripos graduate and at Cambridge was the best woman mathematician of her year. His parents met in the Cavendish Laboratory, when both were engaged in physics research under J.J. Thomson. Nevill grew up first in the village of Giggleswick, in the West ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jagdish Mehra
Jagdish Mehra (April 8, 1931 – September 14, 2008) was an Indian–American physicist and historian of science. Academic career Mehra was educated at Allahabad University, the Max Planck Institut für Physik and the University of California at Los Angeles and obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of Neuchatel. He subsequently taught at Purdue University, Southeastern Massachusetts University, the University of Geneva, the Solvay Institute in Brussels, Rice University, the University of Houston and the International Center for Theoretical Physics. He is particularly well known for his 6 volume-book ''The Historical Development of Quantum Theory'',Mehra, J. and Rechenberg, H. The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Volumes 1-6. New York: Springer-Verlag which he wrote with Helmut Rechenberg. He also wrote a biography of Richard Feynman, ''The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman''. He also wrote a book on the controv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exponential Decay
A quantity is subject to exponential decay if it decreases at a rate proportional to its current value. Symbolically, this process can be expressed by the following differential equation, where is the quantity and (lambda Lambda (; uppercase , lowercase ; , ''lám(b)da'') is the eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiced alveolar lateral approximant . In the system of Greek numerals, lambda has a value of 30. Lambda is derived from the Phoen ...) is a positive rate called the exponential decay constant, disintegration constant, rate constant, or transformation constant: :\frac = -\lambda N(t). The solution to this equation (see #Solution_of_the_differential_equation, derivation below) is: :N(t) = N_0 e^, where is the quantity at time , is the initial quantity, that is, the quantity at time . Measuring rates of decay Mean lifetime If the decaying quantity, ''N''(''t''), is the number of discrete elements in a certain set (mathematics), se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
