After waiting for Rutherford to lose his temper, Chen Muwu responded sincerely: "Director, please allow me to finish my words."

"In our country, there is a famous saying that 'experiment is the only criterion for testing the correctness of a theory'."

In order to be afraid of being fortunate by the river crab god, Chen Muwu also intimately changed a few words.

"If it weren't for Milligan's precise photoelectric experiments, and Peter and Blackett who photographed the trajectories of recoil electrons in the clouds, people wouldn't have believed that light, which has long been thought to be an electromagnetic wave, would actually have the properties of particles.

In the same way, the conjecture of whether the electron is a wave or not, in fact, only needs to design an experiment to test whether the conjecture is correct or not, as you said.

"The easiest way to verify whether an electron is a wave is to see if it can interfere or diffract like light."

Obviously, Rutherford listened to Chen Muwu's words: "'Experiment is the only criterion for testing whether a theory is correct or not', well...... Chen, who said this? He's right! I thought they could make a slogan and hang it in the Cavendish lab. ”

Chen Muwu was full of black lines, why was Rutherford only interested in this sentence!

"Uh...... Director, this is the result of the brainstorming of working people. ”

Rutherford thought quietly for a while, and even picked up Chen Muwu's pen and scratch paper from the table, and counted a few strokes on them.

Then he went on to ask: "If the electron is really a wave, according to the formula you gave, even an electron with an energy of only one electron volt will correspond to a wavelength of about one nanometer."

"This value is much smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so it is not possible to easily obtain an interference or diffraction pattern after passing through a double slit or a single slit like visible light...... Wait a minute!

In this way, the wavelength of an electron with a one-electronvolt energy should be in the same order of magnitude as the wavelength of X-rays. In other words, it is completely possible to let the electrons also enter the crystal as in the X-ray crystal diffraction experiment, and see if there is a diffraction pattern on the photographic film to detect whether the electron is a wave. ”

Looking at Chen Muwu's face full of calm expression, sitting firmly in the Diaoyutai, Rutherford finally suddenly realized: "Chen, have you thought about this experiment a long time ago?" ”

Chen Muwu smiled without saying a word, and then nodded.

"I knew," Rutherford, who was getting more and more excited, even put his hands on Chen Muwu's shoulders, "I knew, Chen, you were a genius!" ”

After all, he was still a young man in his twenties, and Rutherford's praise made Chen Muwu a little fluttery.

But before the latter had time to rejoice, he was poured a scoop of cold water on his head by the former.

"It's a pity, Chen, I'm sorry," Rutherford, who had calmed down after smoking a bag of cigarettes, "I'm afraid I'm not going to let you do this experiment, I mean, at least not for a while now." ”

Well?

Hearing the word "sorry", Chen Muwu felt that something was wrong, and when Rutherford said all the content, Chen Muwu felt that his head suddenly became bigger.

"Director, why is that?"

His tone unconsciously brought anxiety.

Rutherford said with a regretful face: "To tell you the truth, Chen, although you talk about electron fluctuations in a big way, this new electron theory you proposed, or should be called a conjecture, did not convince me, I am pessimistic about the success of this experiment, and I have little confidence.

"I can't just come up with a theory every time you take it for granted, I have to arrange a new experiment, right?

"You know, doing experiments is not done by a flash of inspiration, patting your head, if you want to do a good experiment, you must have full preparation, but also have a strong spirit that can endure the persistence after repeated failures, and repeat the previous useless work again and again.

"Besides, the electron diffraction experiment you mentioned is not the same as the previous gamma ray scattering, and there are too many aspects that need to be spent money."

"But," Chen Muwu still wanted to argue for himself, he really didn't want the electron diffraction experiment to be stillborn like this, "But director, you don't need any special equipment to do this experiment?" All I need is a cathode ray tube to emit an electron beam, an accelerated electric field, a metal crystal, and finally a few photosensitive films. ”

But Rutherford still stubbornly shook his head: "Chen, you have committed a common mistake of people of your age, that is, too young and naïve.

"Do you think doing this experiment is similar to doing X-ray crystal scattering? You only need to prepare the ray source, crystals, and photographic negatives, and put them in the corresponding positions to get the corresponding diffraction pattern? ”

Chen Muwu nodded.

"That's what I thought at first, that's why I think you've come up with a genius idea.

However, after calming down a bit, I realized that electrons are not gamma rays after all, and their penetrating power is not strong, so they cannot propagate in the air unhindered like electromagnetic waves, and it is easy to collide with molecules in the air and produce ionization, which will have a great impact on the experiment.

"However, in order to do your experiment, you have to keep the electron beam, the diffractive crystal, and the photographic film in a high vacuum. And this vacuum level is not yet available in our laboratory.

"Cavendis's current vacuum pump is the same Splenger mercury pump that Sir Thomson and Aston made more than a decade ago, and it can provide a vacuum that is far from allowing your electrons to gain a long enough free path to pass through the potential difference acceleration and crystal diffraction from the cathode emission to finally hit the photographic film.

"I heard that General Electric in the United States has invented a more technologically advanced vacuum pump, but unfortunately, we can't afford it!

"If we're as rich as the Yankees, or even half as rich, then I'm not going to turn down your proposal for experiments.

"But seeing that the end of the year is approaching, and the fall semester of the new school year is about to begin, and there will be a few new students coming into the lab, Cavendish really doesn't have much money on his books to buy that vacuum pump for experiments."

At the mention of money, the expression on Rutherford's face became more and more helpless.

From the experimental environment and experimental equipment, Chen Muwu has seen the poverty of Cavendish Laboratory.

But he didn't expect the actual situation, but it was even poorer than he saw.

With more than £9,000 a year, and spending it in August, it is no wonder that Rutherford would say things like, "Because we don't have money, we have to think."

It seems that this is not because he is modest, but because he really has no money!

Alas!

……

After Rutherford left the conference room, Chen Muwu gradually calmed down.

The director's words are not rough, and every word he says is true.

Regarding the matter of electron diffraction, Chen Muwu only saw the diffraction patterns of Davidson, Ge Mo and Tomson Jr. in textbooks when he was studying quantum mechanics, but he did not understand in detail how these two experiments were made.

Therefore, he took it for granted that electrons were also electromagnetic waves like X-rays, and did not consider that electrons exposed to air would collide with air molecules, produce ionization, and affect the results of experiments.

Jiang is still old and spicy, and it only took a few minutes of thinking time for Rutherford to point out Chen Muwu's problem.

After such a little bit of his dialing, Chen Muwu suddenly realized that he was indeed thinking too little.

He felt that after he crossed over, because everything was going too smoothly, he couldn't help but feel a little flustered recently.

Being scolded by Rutherford also sounded a wake-up call for Chen Muwu, that is, even if he knows the future development of science, in scientific research, he must guard against arrogance and rashness and be down-to-earth.

In the original space-time, after de Broglie proposed the concept of matter waves, when Langevin asked him how to verify the existence of matter waves, de Broglie also proposed the experiment of electron diffraction, like Chen Muwu.

But first, because people think that this French aristocrat is just a newcomer to physics who has not even obtained a doctorate and has no reputation, his statement is too unreasonable, electrons are electrons, and they cannot be waves.

The second reason is that on the European continent at that time, it was really difficult to achieve a vacuum degree that allowed electrons to successfully perform crystal diffraction.

So even though de Broglie had already given the experimental method of crystal diffraction, no one wanted to do it.

Even in the private laboratory of his brother, Maurice de Broglie, Duke of De Broglie, no one wanted to bother with the little prince's nonsense.

Collinton Davidson, who was the first to discover the existence of crystal diffraction in electron beams, and Lester Gémart, in fact, the former had already begun experiments before 1924, when de Broglie proposed the concept of matter waves.

However, their experiments were not originally intended to prove the existence of waves of matter, but only to detect the effects of electron bombardment on metals.

During this period, although David published the results of several experiments, he had no idea that de Broglie, who was far away in Europe, had already put forward the idea of matter waves.

It wasn't until 1926, when Davidson got married again and brought his second wife to England for his honeymoon, that he happened to attend a local physics conference and found Born talking about de Broglie's matter waves with his experimental data published a few years earlier.

It was only after that, David Sun, who returned to the United States, and Tomson Jr., who participated in this conference, designed an experiment on electron beam crystal diffraction that could verify the theory of matter waves in their respective laboratories using low-speed electrons and high-speed electrons respectively, and finally achieved positive experimental results.

If it weren't for Davidson's accidental experiment of electrons bombarding metal surfaces, and Born happened to see the results of this experiment and announced it at the conference, then it may be that people's experimental verification of matter waves is still far away.

This is enough to show how unpopular de Broglie's theory of material waves was when it was first proposed.

It took 18 or 9 years for the photon theory to be finally confirmed through the experimental verification of the photoelectric effect and the Compton effect.

People have just come to believe that light is a wave, and at the same time it is a particle.

Now I want them to believe that the electron, which is originally a particle, is a wave, and of course there will be a strong sense of resistance.

Although Rutherford reprimanded Chen Muwu, and then rejected his request for experiments, it is estimated that compared with the cynicism that Debroy received at the beginning, the attitude of the director of the Cavendish experiment can be regarded as very pleasant!

Happy April Fool's Day!

Thank you for your support in the new month!

(End of chapter)