A son may not agree with his father which is routine! But this father son duo’s ‘disagreement of sorts’ made them both Nobel Laureates!
So JJ Thomson won a Nobel prize in physics in 1906 when he proved that electron was a particle! Then his own son thirty years later in 1937 George Thomson proved won the Nobel prize when he proved that electron was a wave!
JJ Thomson’s atomic model, also known as the plum pudding model, described the atom as a sphere of diffuse positive charge with negatively charged electrons embedded within it. The model was proposed after the discovery of the electron to account for the atom’s overall neutrality, with the positive and negative charges balancing each other out. The analogy compares the electrons to plums in a pudding or seeds in a watermelon! The crux here is that electrons are like particles!
For this he was awarded the Noble prize!
George Thomson’s theory, proven by his 1927 experiments, demonstrated that electrons have a wave-like nature by showing they could be diffracted through thin metal films, creating patterns similar to those of X-rays. This experimental evidence supported Louis de Broglie’s hypothesis of wave-particle duality and earned him a share of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics. His work provided a key part of the foundation for quantum mechanics by proving that particles like electrons can also behave as waves!
So if you do not agree with your father, you may end up in a Nobel prize!
The current notion though is that depending on how you define “shape”, an electron either has no shape, or an electron can take on various wave shapes. The reason for this is that an electron is not a solid little ball!
Rather, electrons are quantum objects. Along with all other quantum objects, an electron is partly a wave and partly a particle. To be more accurate it is instead a quantized fluctuating probability wavefunction!
Now the physics world is eagerly waiting for Thompson’s son to disprove George Thomson and win another Nobel!
For now here’s another son who can make anyone proud! Wing Commander Namansh Syal! You are a true son of the soil…
A big salute for those defense personnel like him who constantly protect us with their lives every day…
Heartfelt condolences to this terrible loss
Jai hind…
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