Word: rayleigh
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...Damnable Hubbub." Prestige of the Britannica grew with succeeding editions, and the editors easily enlisted the world's famous men as writers. Sir Walter Scott wrote on drama. Harvard President Edward Everett, the first American contributor, wrote a biography of Washington. Lord Rayleigh, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1904, was commissioned to write on "Light." He missed his deadline, but the encyclopedia was being published volume by volume in alphabetical order, and his piece was rescheduled under "Optics"-and again as "Undulating Theory of Light." It finally got in under "Wave Theory of Light...
Second director was furry-visaged John William Strutt, Baron Rayleigh, who discovered the "noble" gases (Argon, Helium, etc.) and made the most accurate contemporary determinations of the ohm and the ampere. He got a Nobel Prize 20 years after he retired from the Cavendish directorship. Third director was Sir Joseph John Thomson, who held the post for 35 years, discovered the electron while studying electric discharge in gases. Still alive, a Grand Old Man of 82, Sir Joseph strolls about in a black bowler with a cane clutched behind his back, attends "hall" (dinner) once a week, still putters...
...Cambridge, England, last week, where the British Association for the Advancement of Science was assembled for its summer meeting, two distinguished scientists were much in evidence. One was Robert John Strutt, Baron Rayleigh (pronounced "ray-lee"), an authority on radioactivity, son of the late' great Rayleigh who was best known for his discovery of the "noble" gases (helium, argon, etc.). This year, Lord Rayleigh, 63, is the B. A. A. S. president, and therefore was expected to make British Science's annual philosophical discourse, avoiding grubby details. In his address, Lord Ray leigh defended Science against the charge...
...long time it was supposed to be indigenous to the sun only, but in 1895 Sir William Ramsay (1852-1916), the brilliant British chemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1904, isolated the element from the earth, shortly after he had similarly found argon, in collaboration with Lord Rayleigh. Later it was discovered by Becquerel, the Curies, Rutherford, Soddy and other experts in radioactivity, that the so-called "alpha particles," little groups of four "protons" and two "electrons" given off regularly by uranium and similar substances in their process of degeneration, are in reality atoms of helium. To isolate helium...
...Lord Rayleigh, distinguished English physicist, son of a former Chan cellor of Cambridge University, published a new estimate of the antiquity of the earth, of between two and three billion years, based on a study of the rate of decomposition of radioactive elements. This is vastly greater than any previous estimate, modern geologists having ranged between 100,000,000 and 1,600,000,000 years in their conjectures. All these estimates rest upon very slender assumptions, but that the age of the earth is to be reckoned in hundreds of millions of years is a scientific certainty. Lord Rayleigh...