Daniel Whiteson

But, yeah, nothing so far.

So all of this is really about looking for accidents.

And you have a great story, the Becquerel story, if you wouldn't mind telling it, it's so interesting.

Is that, and maybe I'm getting his name wrong, the uranium photo.

Oh, yeah, Becquerel.

Becquerel.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is one of my favorite stories about discovery in physics because it shows you that you just have to be paying attention and you don't know what the universe is going to reveal to you.

Becquerel was in the late 1800s and he was playing with uranium salts.

And at the time, nobody knew what uranium was.

They didn't realize what it was doing.

It was something they put in glass to make it have cool colors.

Like, that's cool.

And he had a theory about uranium.

He thought that if you put it in the sunlight, that it was going to absorb energy from the sun, and then it was going to emit that energy, and you could see it on radioactive plates.

So he had this whole experiment planned where he was going to put it out in the sun in Paris, and then put it next to radioactive plates, and he'd see the emission from the uranium salts.

But it was cloudy in Paris.

What?

And so he didn't get to do his experiment.

He put the uranium salts in a drawer with the radioactive plates and left for the weekend.