A little boy had been pawing over the stock of greeting cards at a stationery store.
After a few minutes the clerk became curious and asked, "Just what is it you're looking for, sonny? Birthday greeting? Message to a sick friend? Anniversary congratulations to your mom and dad?"
The boy shook his head, "No."
"Then what kind of card is it that you want?" asked the clerk.
The boy answered wistfully, "Got anything in the line of blank report cards?"
Arthur Holly ComptonBorn 10 Sep 1892; died 15 Mar 1962 at age 69. American physicist who was a joint winner, with C.T.R. Wilson of England, of the Nobel Prize for Physics (1927) for his discovery and explanation of the change in the wavelength of X rays when they collide with electrons in metals. This so-called Compton effect is caused by the transfer of energy from a photon to a single electron, then a quantum of radiation is re-emitted in a definite direction by the electron, which in so doing must recoil in a direction forming an acute angle with that of the incident radiation. During WW II, in 1941, he was appointed Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences Committee to Evaluate Use of Atomic Energy in War, assisting in the development of the atomic bomb.[Image: Compton (left) with his assistant Richard L. Doan, 1936.] |
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