Nov 11: Einstein Invents a Safer Fridge and a New Particle Is Found

Host 1 Welcome to this day in science and discovery for kids. On this day, November 11th, we are looking at two amazing stories where scientists looked at a messy noisy problem and well found a really clever solution.

Host 2 Right and we're starting in 1930 with the famous scientist Albert Einstein and his friend Leo Szilard. They actually received a US patent for a totally new kind of refrigerator.

Host 1 and a US patent is basically just, you know, an official paper proving an invention belongs to you.

Host 2 Exactly. So back in the 1920s, everyday fridges used these really harmful gases to keep food cold. And the problem was if the seals on their moving parts broke, those gases could leak right into people's kitchens.

Host 1 Oh, wow. That sounds incredibly dangerous.

Host 2 It really, really was. So Einstein wanted to fix this. He wanted to engineer a totally safe design.

Host 1 But I mean, how do you build a machine that won't break and leak?

Host 2 Well, by getting rid of the moving parts completely. They designed a fridge that used just a heat source, some water, ammonia and butane

Host 1 Wait they used heat to make a fridge cold

Host 2 yeah it sounds a little backwards right but the heat basically pushes those liquids around in a big cycle and since there were absolutely no moving parts that meant there were no mechanical seals to wear out and leak

Host 1 that is so smart but um I did read that making it wasn't super easy like one of their pumps was so noisy a researcher said it howled like a jackal

Host 2 Yeah, yeah the noise was definitely a big problem and actually their fridge never went on sale because a different safer coolant came along right around the same time

Host 1 oh so it was just forgotten

Host 2 not quite it really matters today because in 2008 scientists at Oxford actually rebuilt this exact fridge design since it doesn't need electricity it can help places around the world that are totally off the grid to safely store food and medicine

Host 1 that is amazing and you know just like Einstein used invisible heat to run a fridge in 1974 scientists were hunting for invisible building blocks

Host 2 right we're talking about particles here

Host 1 particles are the tiny bits that make up everything around you like you me the stars everything and scientists use giant machines called particle accelerators to study them right

Host 2 exactly these machines are huge and they just smash bits together at super high speeds to see what pops out so Samuel Ting in New York and Burton Richter in California were both doing this working 3,000 3,000 miles apart

Host 1 just totally separate from each other

Host 2 yeah totally independent and on November 11th 1974 they met in California and realized they had discovered the exact same brand new heavy particle

Host 1 Which is wild because spotting Ting's tiny signal in all that data was described as being well like hearing a cricket close to a jumbo jet taking off

Host 2 It was an incredible catch and it really matters because it proved that a missing building block one they called the charm quark really exists and it was such a big deal that it earned them the 1976 Nobel Prize

Host 1 and they had to figure out a name for it together right

Host 1 yeah so

Host 2 yeah so Ting had named it J and Richter had named it Psi so today they just combine it and it's called the J psi particle

Host 1 I love that

Host 2 yeah

Host 1 well also on this day in 1743 Swedish plant explorer Carl Peter Thunberg was born later discovering a thousand plants new to science and in 1904 mathematician J.H.C. Whitehead was born to study topology the math of shapes that stretch and bend.

Host 2 and hey did you know that Richter's team originally named their particle SP after their machine but they changed it because the particle tracks in their pictures looked just like the Greek letter psi

Host 1 thanks for tuning in see you back here tomorrow