From: sarfatti@well.sf.ca.us (Jack Sarfatti)
Subject: FEYNMAN 13
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 09:05:53 GMT


Feynman 13 Surprising Connections.
p.79 Gleick "In Rome, as the 1930's began, Enrico Fermi [an Italian Jew
whose wife Laura wrote an important biography of Mussolini which mention
his close connections to the Jewish Sarfatti family before his pact with
the Devil Hitler] made his own tiny radiation counters ...He methodically
brought one element after another into contact with free neutrons streaming
from samples of radioactive radon. By his hands were created a succession
of new radioactive isotopes, substances never seen in nature, some with
half-lives so short that Fermi had to race his samples down the corrider to
test them before they decayed into immeasurability. He found a nameless new
element heavier than any found in nature.  By hand he placed lead barriers
across the neutron stream, and then, in a moment of mysterious inspiration,
he tried a barrier of paraffin. Something in paraffin - hydrogen? - seemed
to slow the neutrons. Unexpectedly, the slow neutrons has a far more
powerful effect on some of the bombarded elements. Because the neutrons
were electrically neutral, they floated transparently through the knots of
electric charge around the target atoms ['nuclei' would be better than
'atoms' here - JS]. At speeds barely faster than a batted baseball they had
more time to work nuclear havoc ... it seemed to him .... a kind of
diffusion, analogous to the slow invasion of the still air of a room by the
scent of perfume.

By the spring of 1938 ... MIT decided to offer a graduate seminar on the
theory of nuclear structure .... Feynman and Welton, juniors, showed up ...
p. 80 Like quantum mechanics, this was difficult new territory. No text
book existed. There was just one essential text for anyone studying nuclear
physics in 1938: a series of three long articles in Reviews of Modern
Physics by Hans Bethe, a young German physicist newly relocated to Cornell
[I took Bethe's senior honors seminar at Cornell in 1959 on experimental
tests of special relativity. Bethe gave me a paper that Julian Schwinger
wrote on the polarization of radiation emitted by electrons in circular
orbits or synchrotron radiation. I could not understand a part of
Schwinger's math for the polarization in directions out of the plane of the
electron orbit. I went to Professor Bethe's office. He looked at the paper.
After awhile, he looked up at me from his desk and saud that the reason I
could not follow it was because there was a mathematical error. Bethe gave
a talk about it at Newman Nuclear Lab, and mentioned that I brought it to
his attention. He puplished a short note on it - apparently it has some
practical significance.  I also got the idea of using long-lived isomeric
nuclear transitions to make a gamma ray 'maser' by listening to Bethe - but
he thought it would not work back then. In 1964 I got a primitive idea to
used laser beams to confine thermonuclear plasma - and I spent time at
United Kingdom Atomic Energy Reseach Establishment at Harwell because my
idea came to the attention of Ron Bullough, director of theoretical physics
at the time in 1966. I worked with Keith Brueckner for awhile at UCSD - but
I lost interest in the problem - JS]  back to Feynman

"As he studied these most modern branches of physics, Feynman also looked
for chances to explore more classical problems, problems he could
visualize.  He investigated the scattering of sunlight by clouds. ...The
scattering of waves implied a gneral diffusion, a randomizing of the
original directionality. The sky is blue because the molecules of the
atmosphere scatter the blue wavelengths more than the others. The blue
seems to come from everywhere in the sky  ... water molecules scatter light
perfectly well when they are floating as vapor, yet the light grows much
whiter and more intense when the vapor condenses, because the molecules
come so close together that their tiny electric fields can resonate in
phase with one another to multiply the effect. Feynman tried to understand
also what happened to the direction of the scattered light, and he
discovered something that he could not believe at first. When the light
emerges from the cloud again, aroming off billions of droplets, seemingly
smeared to an ubiquitous gray, it actually retains some memory of its
original direction. One foggy day he looked at a building far away across
the river in Boston and saw its outline, faint but still sharp, diminished
in contrast but not in focus. He thought: the mathematics worked after all.
p.81

Feynman's probing reache the edge of known science. His scattering
calculations had immediate application to .... cosmic rays ... of unknown
origin, streaming through space at high energies and entering the
atmosphere   ,,, At MIT Vallarta was puzzling over how cosmic rays might be
scattered by the magnetic fields of the galaxy's stars, just as cloud
droplets scatter sunlight. Whether cosmic rays came from inside or outside
the galaxy, should the scattering effect bias their apparent direction
toward or away from the main body of the Milky Way? Feynman's work produced
a negative answer: neither. The net effect of the scattering was zero. If
cosmic rays seemed to come from all directions, it was not because the
star's interference disguised their original orientaton. " p.82