Summary
Emilio Segre made one of the most important elemental discoveries. Together with Linus Pauling, they both transformed the periodic table and its chemistry. Pauling tried to get to the University of California Berkeley by sending the letter to Gilbert Lewis, but the letter was lost and the University regretted not having read that important letter. Segre, as a refugee, asked to join the Berkeley Lab Radiation, and was accepted, but with a lower wage. After a few years they overcame these problems, and became two of the greatest unknown scientists ever heard. But they became infamous for making two of the biggest mistakes. Mistakes are not always wrong, and some have even pushed science forward. The mistakes they made, were due to extremely complicated experiments on explaining the behavior of atoms.
Many elements, but element forty-three the most, have been discovered for the first time, plenty of times.These “first times” were due to the discovery of an impure form of an element. Ogawa tried to prove his discovery of element 43, but instead, he made the discovery of element seventy-five, Rhenium, this was not known until 2004. In 1937, Emilio Segre and Carlo Perrier taking advantage of new work in nuclear physics and instead of looking for the element itself, decided to create it. American Ernest Lawrence created an atom smasher. Segre asked Lawrence if he could add some Molybdenum scraps to this machine, Segre turned out to be right and on those strips, He and Perrier found traces of the so much seeked element 43. Segre and Perrier named the element Technetium which is greek for the word “artificial”, this was done because of technetium was the first man-made element. Enrico Fermi accidentally and without even noticing, introduced the uranium fission. Fermi has wrongly thought to have discovered element ninety-three. Two German scientists proved him wrong and it was a total chaos because he had already won a Nobel Prize. Women were the closest to get to discover fission, and Lise Meitner, was the one who actually discovered it. Segre trying to find element ninety-three and trying to find it the same way he did technetium, the rare earths he found were as he thought, a complete failure. Edwin McMillan felt that this was not right, and he found the the rare earths that Segre had found were different from the rest; he found the first “forbidden element”, Neptune.
Pauling used quantum mechanics to understand chemical bonds between atoms, their strength, length, and angles. He was the one who discovered why the snowflakes have the hexagonal shapes. He was also a great at physical chemistry and discovered the reason of illnesses such as the sickle cell anemia. Pauling became interested in DNA and made conclusions about it that he believed were right, but did not feel right. Students in Cambridge decided to study this subject and based on Pauling’s study, knew they were on the right path. Watson and Crick gathered information about other scientists and knew how to interpret it and combine it correctly. A man suggested them about the pairing of the nucleic acids A, C, G and T. These fitted correctly into their theories. Pauling having ignored the theory of pairing felt the humiliation when these students figured out the mystery of DNA. Owen Chamberlain discovered the antiproton which have negative charge, travel backwards, will annihilate any “real” matter, and is the mirror image of a proton.
Reflection
This chapter was very entertaining and ironic to what happened to these two brilliant individuals. They seem to have let themselves be guided by arrogance and ambition rather than the scientific curiosity and its delicacy that teaches scientists about the world. I found it surprising how women were involved in the discovery of fission and that is a great step for the women to their integration to the scientific world. A part that I found very stressful was the fact that both Stern and Pauling, but specially Pauling, were told many times to be careful, and/or many other clues that could have enlarged their understanding on the subject, but they ignored it instead of studying it, and even though they were brilliant minds, they did not get the credit that could have been theirs. I had learned about the fission, but I never thought that women were the discoverers of this important discovery. I also learned that it was Pauling the one that figured out about the reason of the shape of the snowflakes. I had learned about the process, but I did not know who had discovered.
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