ARMORED PENGUIN CROSSWORD PUZZLE MAKER FULL

By the late 1920’s scientists in the US and UK had seen electrons behaving like waves. And once you have the idea of electrons as waves, you can look for just that. It’s a bizarre idea, but it’s also the inevitable result of putting clues together. And if electrons are waves, then you can easily explain Bohr’s rule for picking the allowed orbits. If light, which everyone knew was a wave, behaves like a particle, he suggested that an electron, which everyone knew was a particle, should behave like a wave.

ARMORED PENGUIN CROSSWORD PUZZLE MAKER FULL

The final piece came from Louis de Broglie, who brought the whole thing full circle. But again, there’s a tiny difficulty: there’s no reason those special orbits should be special. Each element has its own set of allowed orbits, leading to its own unique set of frequencies. An atom absorbs or emits light only when an electron moves between orbits, and the frequency of the light depends on the energy difference through Planck’s rule.īohr’s quantum atom fixes Rutherford’s problem, and also explains the specific frequencies of light emitted by atoms. Bohr proposed that in certain special orbits, electrons sit happily, not emitting light. Rutherford’s atom should spit out a huge burst of x-rays in the brief instant before the electron spirals down to crash into the nucleus.īut Niels Bohr, working with Rutherford, pointed out that atoms manifestly exist, so maybe the rules need to change.

Classical physics says that electrons whipping around in circles emit light-we use this all the time to generate x-rays and radio waves. Rutherford’s atom has one problem: it can’t work. The cartoon atom you learn in grade school, with electrons orbiting the nucleus like a tiny solar system-that’s Rutherford’s. The next step came from Ernest Rutherford, who bounced alpha particles off gold and showed that the mass of an atom is concentrated in a tiny nucleus. That’s three letters toward the theme clue about light and matter. Even people who hated the idea had to admit that he had a point. Einstein himself called this the only truly revolutionary thing he did-but it worked brilliantly to explain how light knocks electrons out of metals. He applied Planck’s quantum idea to the light itself, and said that light, which everyone knew was a wave, was also a stream of photons, each carrying a discrete amount of energy. Planck was never happy with this, but Einstein ran with it.

Planck had explained the light emitted by hot objects using a desperate trick: he said that hot objects emit light only in discrete chunks, units of energy that depend on the frequency of the light. The theme clue that led to the duality of everything is “How does light interact with matter?” The first person to seriously suggest the dual nature of light was Albert Einstein in 1905, picking up an earlier idea from Max Planck. If all of those other crossing words fit together in a satisfying way, you can be confident that you’ve also got the right the theme answer. Instead, you piece them together a letter at a time from the simpler clues that cross them. You can’t look those up, and you won’t guess them. I’m talking about the puzzle as a whole-those theme clues that run all the way across the grid, and contain a five-word phrase or a dreadful pun. I don’t mean dictionaries full of words sorted by length. We were led to the dual nature of the universe through the same process you follow to solve a crossword puzzle. So, what bizarre thought process could make physicists think they’re the same? The answer is surprisingly familiar. The cool quantum stuff I teach my dog- Schrödinger’s cat God playing dice, spooky action at a distance-all starts from the fact that everything in the universe has both particle and wave nature.īut when we look around us, we see waves in water and particles of rock, and they’re nothing alike. I’m going to tell you the most amazing thing I know, which is this: everything in the universe, from light, to electrons, to atoms- behaves like both a particle and a wave at the same time. But this will give you something to read while I drive back home from The City, and I can provide a more detailed recap later. I don’t really know, because I’m scheduling this post on Tuesday morning, before the actual event, using the draft text I’ve been rehearsing with. Approximate, because I’m somewhat prone to ad-libbing when speaking, and may have changed a few things here and there.

The following is the approximate text of the talk I gave at last night.

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