This Day in Science & Discovery — Nov 11: Einstein Patents Safer Fridge and J/psi Particle Found

Host 1: Welcome to This Day in Science and Discovery. On this day, November 11th, well, imagine waking up in 1926 AD Berlin, to some pretty terrifying news.

Host 2: Alright, the story about that family dying because their mechanical fridge leaked toxic gas.

Host 1: Yeah, exactly. And our mission for you today is exploring how monumental scientific minds tackle both everyday domestic tragedies like that one and the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Host 2: Because um that 1926 AD tragedy actually profoundly affected Albert Einstein of all people.

Host 1: Which is so interesting.

Host 2: Yeah.

Host 1: Like Einstein focusing on kitchen safety instead of relativity

Host 2: yeah well back then mechanical refrigerators used these highly toxic coolants um methyl chloride things like that so Einstein teamed up with his former student physicist Leo Szilard to design something that just wouldn't kill you if it broke

Host 1: so they basically engineered a solid state fridge to save lives

Host 2: I mean essentially yes they focused on absorption refrigerators and on November 11th 1930 AD they were granted US patent 1 million 781,541

Host 1: Wow, an actual patent? What was the mechanism?

Host 2: It used water, ammonia, and butane, and it had zero moving parts, meaning...

Host 1: So no seals to fail.

Host 2: Right, exactly. No seals to fail and leak toxic gas. It just needed a heat source.

Host 1: That's brilliant.

Host 2: It was. Though, you know, they filed over 45 patents together and not all of them were quite so perfectly silent

Host 1: Wait, really?

Host 2: Yeah. One was for an electromagnetic pump pushing liquid metal. and a researcher at the time actually said it howled like a jackal

Host 1: That sounds terrifying. So why aren't our kitchens howling today or, you know, using the silent solid state ones?

Host 2: Mostly bad timing. The Great Depression hit and the 1930 AD invention of non-toxic Freon totally killed its consumer prospects.

Host 1: Ah, of course.

Host 2: But the pump actually cooled breeder reactors later on and an Oxford team revived the fridge in 2008 AD for off-grid locations.

That

Host 1: That is incredible. And you know from harnessing fluid dynamics to solve a practical household problem we actually move to the exact same date decades later where independent teams collided with destiny in high energy physics.

Host 2: Right the November evolution. Let's jump to 1974 AD. 1974 AD.

Host 1: Okay what happened?

Host 2: So Samuel Ting at Brookhaven was firing protons at a fixed target and he saw a sharp anomaly at 3.1 billion electron volts.

Host 1: And someone else found it too.

Host 2: Yeah. Burton Richter's group at SLAC was colliding electrons and positrons and they found a peak at 3.09 billion electron volts on November 10th.

Host 1: So they're seeing the same thing.

Host 2: Exactly. And then on November 11th, 1974, 80, they meet at SLAC, realize they have the exact same unexpected heavy particle, and they present it to a packed auditorium.

Host 1: Oh, wow. The drama.

Host 2: Right. Ting named it J, Richter named it Psi.

Host 1: Hence the J Psi particle.

Host 2: I actually read that the Nobel Committee described finding Ting's signal as like hearing a cricket close to a jumbo jet taking off.

Host 1: It was an incredibly tiny signal in all that noise. Yeah.

Host 2: But how does one cricket of a signal trigger an entire revolution in physics?

Host 1: because of how long it survived.

Host 2: It lived a thousand times longer than anyone expected.

Host 1: A thousand times. What was keeping it so stable?

Host 2: It proved to be a charm quark bound tightly to its anti-quark. That trapped state was massive evidence for a fourth quark.

Host 1: Which sparked the November revolution.

Host 2: Exactly. And earned them the 1976 AD Nobel Prize.

Host 1: Incredible. Now also on this day in exactly one sentence in 1743 AD botanist Carl Peter Thunberg who later pioneered Japanese botany was born and in 1904 AD mathematician J.H. C. Whitehead best remembered for homotopy equivalence was born

Host 2: So just to wrap up consider how scientific progress requires two extremes intentionally collaborating to solve a known problem like Einstein's fridge and accidentally discovering the exact same cosmic secret independently like the J Psi particle.

Host 1: Thanks for tuning in see you back here tomorrow.