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The thought experiment concerns a lamp that is toggled on and off with increasing frequency. Thomson's lamp is a philosophical puzzle based on infinites. It was devised in 1954 by British philosopher James F. Thomson, who used it to analyze the possibility of a supertask, which is the completion of an infinite number of tasks.
Thomson's prize-winning master's work, Treatise on the motion of vortex rings, shows his early interest in atomic structure. [3] In it, Thomson mathematically described the motions of William Thomson's vortex theory of atoms. [17] Thomson published a number of papers addressing both mathematical and experimental issues of electromagnetism.
In 1897, J. J. Thomson investigated ultraviolet light in Crookes tubes. [37] Thomson deduced that the ejected particles, which he called corpuscles, were of the same nature as cathode rays. These particles later became known as the electrons. Thomson enclosed a metal plate (a cathode) in a vacuum tube, and exposed it to high-frequency radiation ...
Thomson's experiments with cathode rays (1897): J. J. Thomson's cathode ray tube experiments (discovers the electron and its negative charge). Eötvös experiment (1909): Loránd Eötvös publishes the result of the second series of experiments, clearly demonstrating that inertial and gravitational mass are one and the same.
The prevailing model of atomic structure before Rutherford's experiments was devised by J. J. Thomson. [1]: 123 Thomson had discovered the electron through his work on cathode rays [2] and proposed that they existed within atoms, and an electric current is electrons hopping from one atom to an adjacent one in a series.
Thomson's model was incomplete, it could not predict any of the known properties of the atom such as emission spectra or valencies. In 1906, Robert A. Millikan and Harvey Fletcher performed the oil drop experiment in which they measured the charge of an electron to be about -1.6 × 10 −19, a value now defined as -1 e.
Thomson's model marks the moment when the development of atomic theory passed from chemists to physicists. While atomic theory was widely accepted by chemists by the end of the 19th century, physicists remained skeptical because the atomic model lacked any properties which concerned their field, such as electric charge, magnetic moment, volume, or absolute mass.
In a seminal 1954 article [3] which followed on from the work of Max Black, [4] Thomson considered the successful completion of an infinite number of tasks within a given time, to which he gave the name supertasks. To disprove the possibility of supertasks, he introduced Thomson's lamp, a thought experiment similar to Zeno's paradoxes.