In 1709 Hauksbee observed that when air inside a glass vessel was evacuated... [to] 1/60 normal air pressure and the vessel was attached to... fricti… - Steven Weinberg

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In 1709 Hauksbee observed that when air inside a glass vessel was evacuated... [to] 1/60 normal air pressure and the vessel was attached to... frictional electricity, a strange light would be seen... Flashes... similar... had... been noticed in the partial vacuum above... mercury in barometers. ...[T]oday we know ...[w]hen an electric current flows through a gas, the electrons knock into the gas atoms and give up some... energy... reemitted as as light. Today's fluorescent lights and neon signs are based on the same principle... but even at 1/60 atmospheric pressure the air interfered too much with the flow of electrons to allow their nature to be discovered. Real progress became possible only when the gas... could be removed...

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About Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg (born 3 May 1933 – 23 July 2021) was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow) for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.

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Additional quotes by Steven Weinberg

[T]he property of being a geodesic is invariant under coordinate transformations... so the path of the photon or particle will... be a geodesic in any spatial coordinate system...

Under ordinary circumstances, visible light is absorbed or emitted when the electrons in an atom or molecule are excited into orbits of higher energy, or sink back into orbits of lower energy, respectively.

Where I knew them I have included references to... the Cornell archive, ...arxiv.org, as well as to the published literature. ...I have quoted the latest measurements of cosmological s known to me, in part... to give the reader a sense of what is... observationally possible. ...I have not tried to combine measurements from observations of different types because... it would [not] add... additional physical insight and any... cosmological concordance would... soon be out of date.

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