Épisodes

  • How Absolute Zero Was Discovered

    How Absolute Zero Was Discovered
    May 14 2026
    Absolute zero is the theoretical limit to how cold temperature can reach. The quest to calculate the value of it started in the 1700s, but wasn't accurately done so until the mid 1800s by British physicist William Thomson. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    9 min
  • How Oxygen Was Discovered

    How Oxygen Was Discovered
    May 14 2026
    In the 1770s, a revolution in chemistry had just begun, starting in Uppsala, Sweden. A young apothecary named Carl Wilhelm Scheele began a series of experiments that led to the eventual downfall of an entire theory of fire that had dominated chemistry for a century. This theory was known as the theory of phlogiston; phlogiston was an invisible substance that released from materials when they burned and was absorbed by air or other substances. Scheele supported phlogiston from his results, but his went unpublished for five years, leading to another chemist, Joseph Priestley, getting credit for the discovery of what Scheele called "fire air." This is the story of how Scheele, Priestley, and a French chemist named Antoine Lavoisier discovered a substance that would eventually tackle the theory of phlogiston and replace it with a new theory of oxygen. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    18 min
  • How the Atom Was Split for the First Time

    How the Atom Was Split for the First Time
    May 14 2026
    Ever since the discovery of the proton in 1919 by Ernest Rutherford, scientists had been on a mission to break atoms apart, splitting them into their smaller components in hopes of changing elements into others. This was first successfully done by two of Rutherford's pupils, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in 1932 after their invention of the world's first particle accelerator. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    8 min
  • How Electron Spin Was Discovered

    How Electron Spin Was Discovered
    May 14 2026
    In 1887, physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley discovered a new phenomenon that would come to be known as the fine structure of spectral lines. These spectral lines split into two or more components, and other effects like the Zeeman and Stark effects also showed cases where spectral lines split. The quest to answer why this happened took almost 40 years and would end with the discovery of a new characteristic of an electron known as "spin". Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    20 min
  • How The Atomic Number Was Discovered

    How The Atomic Number Was Discovered
    May 14 2026
    Henry Moseley was a British physicist known for his discovery of Moseley's Law, which relates the atomic number to the "characteristic X-ray" of each element. Before Moseley's discovery, the atomic number was merely an arbitrary number given to elements, and was not the way elements were sorted on the periodic table. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    8 min