Roentgenor: X Marks the Unknown
Nuclear & Particle Physics arc, page 179 of 193. Back to The Pixelated Physics Universe
Who they are
Roentgenor stands in a dark lab and holds up a glowing screen. Behind him, a tube wrapped in black card. Between them, something nobody could see. X marks the unknown.
Roentgenor is a character of the Nuclear & Particle Physics arc: drawn in pixels, ruled by one piece of real physics, and never allowed to break it.
The physics
On 8 November 1895, in Würzburg, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was working with a cathode-ray tube wrapped in thin black card. In the darkened room, a screen painted with barium platinocyanide began to glow. No visible light could get through the card, yet something did, crossed the room and lit the screen. He called the new rays "X-Strahlen", X-rays, and their nature was unknown. This November 8 marks the anniversary of that discovery. His paper, "Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen", was submitted on 28 December 1895 to the Physical-Medical Society of Würzburg (Sitzungsberichte, pp. 132–141); an English translation appeared in Nature on 23 January 1896. In 1901 he received the first Nobel Prize in Physics.
$$ \begin{gathered} E = \frac{hc}{\lambda} \\ \lambda_{\text{min}} = \frac{hc}{eV} \end{gathered} $$
| Symbol | Meaning | SI unit |
|---|---|---|
| $E$ | photon energy | J |
| $h$ | Planck constant | J·s |
| $c$ | speed of light | m/s |
| $\lambda$ | wavelength | m |
| $\lambda_{\text{min}}$ | shortest wavelength from the tube (Duane–Hunt limit) | m |
| $e$ | elementary charge | C |
| $V$ | tube voltage | V |
Honest caveat: Röntgen's lab notes were not preserved, so the date 8 November 1895 comes from his later accounts. It is the standard date, but no notebook records it. In the paper, he says he chose the name "X-rays" to tell them apart from other rays.
Sources
- Röntgen (1895) Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen, Sitzungsber. Phys.-Med. Ges. Würzburg, pp. 132–141
- Röntgen (1896) On a New Kind of Rays, Nature 53, 274
- Duane & Hunt (1915) On X-Ray Wave-Lengths, Phys. Rev. 6, 166
- NobelPrize.org — The Nobel Prize in Physics 1901
Crossovers
Roentgenor meets Nickela (Electrons Diffract 1927). Roentgenor's X-rays were later shown to diffract from crystals. Nickela did the same with electrons in 1927, which confirmed that matter has waves too.
Roentgenor meets Okloa (Earth's Own Reactor). Okloa's reactor ran on uranium. Roentgenor's X-rays opened the door to finding radioactivity: Becquerel's discovery in uranium came months later.
Wear the lore
Concept keywords: X Marks the Unknown, Roentgenor, Nuclear & Particle Physics, physics lore, Pixelated Physics