Disappointing, Joe. 5% is just a little on the slow side, relativity speaking. (:->) I would not call 5% a data point.
Roger > Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2013 19:24:42 -0700 > From: jbarr...@slac.stanford.edu > To: vortex-l@eskimo.com > Subject: Re: [Vo]:I confess > > Actually, Rutherford's gold foil experiment used alpha particles, > generated by Radon radioactive decay. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger%E2%80%93Marsden_experiment > > According to http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/alpha.html and > http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alpha_decay alpha particles > typically have an energy around 5 MeV which works out to be a velocity > of 5% that of light. > > - Joe > > On 6/4/2013 6:12 PM, leaking pen wrote: > > I do know that beta particles, used in the famous gold foil > experiments, are .75 c in vacuum, but often faster than c in other > materials. > > > > > > On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 5:26 PM, Roger B <rogerbi...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > > > I confess to being an ignoramus. I confess to having only a B.A. > in psychology, a B.A. in philosophy, and an A.S. in electronics > technology. I am, however, a philosophical savant. > > > > I have a question that I have asked several times but have never > gotten an answer. By what means do conventional physicist probe and > understand the innards of the atom? What is the minimum speed of the > particles that they shoot into the atom to see what is there? Do they > ever use some version of light to understand the innards of the atom? > > > > If, as I suppose, and I could be wrong, all of the particles > "shot" into the atom are traveling close to the speed of light, then > could not there be some unknown characteristic at this speed, perhaps as > yet unknown to us, that causes things inside the atom to behave > differently than from how they would behave if the probing particle were > going much slower. For example, what if the almost light speed particle > had a bow wave in front of it as it flew through the aether? If every > single particle that was used to probe the inside of the atom were > traveling at .99 the speed of light, then this "distortion" would be the > same in every experiment, and one aspect of this limited view inside the > atom we might call the "Coulomb Barrier". > > > > Is this all possible? Or am I off base? > > > > > > Roger Bird > > Colorado > > >
