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McHistory goes back in time to explore big moments and small stories from McLean County history. McHistory episodes can be heard periodically on WGLT's Sound Ideas.
McLean County has one Nobel prize winner — but oh what a one!
Modern electronics rests upon Clinton Davisson’s physics experiments bombarding a block of crystalized nickel with electrons. Davisson and his colleague at Bell labs, L.H. Germer, measured the angle at which the electrons were scattered by the nickel.
“What appeared, and what still appears to many of us as a contradiction in terms, had been proved true beyond the least possible doubt — light was at once a flight of particles and a propagation of waves; for light persisted, unreasonably, to exhibit the phenomenon of interference,” said Davisson in his 1937 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
A British researcher with whom Davisson shared the Nobel was running similar experiments about the same time. During his address in Stockholm, Davisson found the coincidence unremarkable.
“Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before; the stage is set, the time is ripe, and the event occurs — more often than not at widely separated placed at almost the same moment,” said Davisson.
