Did you know that …?

By the beginning of the study of the radio emission of the Moon astronomers had one quite reliable characteristic of the Moon - the temperature of its surface. It was measured back in the 1930s by astrophysicists Petit and Nicholson by a simple, witty and so accurate method that so far no one has been able to exceed this accuracy. Based on the readings of infrared rays, scientists have established an amazing thing. The surface of our satellite heated at noon to plus 120 degrees Celsius at lunar night is bound by frost in minus 150 degrees Celsius...

The problem of the origin of cosmic particles suddenly crossed paths with another very important problem. Having solved the mystery of the birth of cosmic particles - and we are close to it - it will be possible to recreate the processes on Earth that produce such high energy particles. The time has passed when (as it was in the 1930s) physicists who dreamed of bombing nuclei with space particles were considered fantasists. They were said to be similar to those of the scholarly men...

Research carried out on artificial satellites and space rockets helped to find out the geography of the world of space particles and helped to determine where and in what quantity these particles are around the Earth. Soviet scientists S.N. Vernov and A.E. Chudakov and the American scientist Van Allen made a discovery that in many ways changed the previous views on the regularities of changing the composition of cosmic rays with height. First of all it was found out that the magnetic...

Indeed, the impression of Dirac's phenomenal discovery was still fresh, and there were years of silence that were gently bypassed by physicists of the Dirac equation, when the American scientist Anderson first saw the trace of a positively charged electron, born in Wilson's chamber when a space particle passed through it. His path was curved by a magnetic field in the opposite direction to the path of an ordinary electron. All other signs coincided. Undoubtedly, it was the same positron that Dirac brilliantly predicted to exist...

Dirac's equation behaved like a disobedient genie, carelessly released from a bottle. What the scientists read in this equation seemed to them, to put it mildly, a misunderstanding. They did not want to offend the author with a stronger word. On an equal footing with a negatively charged electron, a positive electron took its rightful place in it! "Isn't it a paradox? - thought the involuntary culprit of this strange discovery. Dirac was not looking for this particle at all. He didn't even know it existed...