#ri science
‘On October 3rd, he asked me what day it is’
‘It’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry day’
Mean Girls Day meets the Nobel Prize on the best day of 2018 so far
Back in 1967 our former Director George Porter won the #NobelPrize in Chemistry for using lasers to study super fast chemical reactions ⚗️
In the 1950s, Porter had brought one of the first ruby lasers to the UK to develop his technique, Flash Photolysis
- First a strong flash of light from a laser excites a chemical’s molecules in a known quantity of a substance
- Then further flashes record how long it takes all excited molecules to return to their baseline state, by looking at the different proportions in the sample over time
Amazing to think how far we’ve come with laser technology in the last 60 years - especially looking at this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics winners! #pewpew
The history of climate science goes back a long way. In 1859, spurred by his work on glaciers, John Tyndall discovered how gases absorb heat by developing and experimenting with extremely sensitive equipment called the ‘radiant heat apparatus’.
Knowing how different gases absorb heat to different degrees helped scientists later understand how heat is trapped by the Earth’s atmosphere - what we now call the greenhouse effect.
As a glaciologist and physicist Tyndall spent a lot of his time hanging out on mountains. Here he is outside the house he had built up Belalp in Switzerland, with his wife Louisa peeking through the front door.
If you’re in the USA, tune in to Nova on PBS tonight at 8pm to catch Andrea Sella recreate Tyndall’s radiant heat experiments, right here at the Royal Institution where he first made his breakthrough.