William Wilson and the Absorption of Beta Rays

摘要

In the first decade of the 20~(th) century, physicists believed that the β particles emitted in radioactive decay were monoenergetic and that such monoenergetic electrons would be absorbed exponentially in passing through matter. Conversely, they also believed that if electrons followed an exponential absorption law then they were monoenergetic. William Wilson showed conclusively that this view was wrong. After Wilson's work, physicists changed the experimental technique they used to investigate the phenomena. Instead of using absorption to measure the decay energy, they now used magnetic spectroscopy with various detectors as their standard method. Although Wilson's work changed the entire practice of the field and showed that the accepted view on electron absorption was wrong, references to it soon disappeared. Perhaps more surprisingly, after 1912 Wilson himself no longer published work on β particles and disappeared from the physics literature completely. The reasons for this also will be discussed.