Tag: Physics

Scientific discovery under Nazi Rule – The curious case of Walther Kossel and Gottfried Möllenstedt

A picture of the German physicist, Walther Kossel.

Physicist Dr Alex Hubert, a Kent graduate, writes a personal account of the troubling history that lies behind his field of expertise. A weary PhD student approaching the end of writing my thesis, I needed to look up the original paper [1] of the convergent beam electron diffraction (or CBED)  technique [2]. Before I had …

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Big Science and the Atomic Clock

Caesium Atomic Clock 1955 on display in the Science Museum, London, England.

Modern Times means Modern Time! Don’t trust the Earth, trust the Atom! This was the first successful atomic clock. In 1955, when it was developed, it proved more accurate than any other time keeper in the world. The use of stable vibrations of caesium atoms at a time standard was first proposed by the physicist …

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