- What made the barium platinocyanide screen glow when Röntgen's cathode-ray tube was covered?
- Why did Röntgen name the rays 'X' instead of giving them a more descriptive name?
- Why did Röntgen refuse to patent X-rays?
- How did the photograph of Anna Röntgen's hand change how people understood the inside of the human body?
X-Rays in Medicine
The discovery and diagnostic use of X-rays.
- What did Lenard's cathode-ray experiments establish about the nature of the rays?
- How did Lenard's work feed into J. J. Thomson's identification of the electron?
- How did J.J. Thomson use cathode rays to show that atoms are not indivisible?
- What did Barkla discover about the secondary X-rays that different elements emit when struck by primary radiation?
- How did Barkla's mapping of characteristic X-rays give chemists a non-destructive way to identify elements?
- What modern technologies, from airport scanners to art conservation, trace back to Barkla's characteristic X-rays?
- Why did Röntgen refuse to patent his discovery of X-rays even as it transformed medicine and industry?
- Where did the letter 'X' in X-rays actually come from?
- What fields of science and technology trace their origins to Röntgen's accidental 1895 discovery?
- What did Compton's X-ray scattering experiment prove about the nature of light?
- How did X-ray-induced mutations reveal which gene controlled which metabolic step?
- How much did Muller's 1927 X-ray experiments increase the mutation rate in Drosophila?
- What did Muller's findings reveal about the relationship between radiation exposure and heritable genetic damage?
- Why did Muller's political history, including his time in the Soviet Union, complicate his scientific legacy?
- How did X-ray-induced mutations reveal the link between genes and enzymes?
- How does computed tomography reconstruct a slice-by-slice map of the body's interior from X-rays?
- How did Hounsfield's idea of combining many X-ray angles produce a cross-sectional image?
- Why are X-rays poor at detecting light elements like hydrogen inside a crystal, and how do neutrons get around that blind spot?