RankingsPrimerArbiterPhysicistMathematicianContrarianQESites logClaimsSourcesResearch notes

Other sites, 2026-10-08

Investigator (STEP I), project Thompson-JJ. Shorter visits, one section per site.

Trinity College Cambridge archives (archives.trin.cam.ac.uk), partial

  • Google result pointed to fonds THMJ I, "Papers of Sir Joseph Thomson (J. J. Thomson), Part I", and says most of his scientific papers are in Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 7654 (also Parts II and III at Trinity). The direct page URL guessed returned "page not found".
  • Site search Thomson corpuscle returned fonds THMF, "Papers of the Thomson family", 1859-2002: papers of J. J., Rose, George and Joan Thomson; later papers on biographies and the 1997 electron centenary. "J. J. Thomson" helium: no results. [web]
  • Falconer, "Corpuscles, Electrons and Cathode Rays" (BJHS 1987) cites CUL MS Add 7654 notebooks NB35a, NB36 (Google snippet). [web] Historical record (priority 4): the notebooks are the lab record behind claims 1 and 5.

Archives Hub (archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk), blocked

The National Archives Discovery (Google snippet only)

  • Record "Thomson, Sir Joseph John, (1856-1940), Knight, physicist" lists CUL Add 7654 and Trinity College Library. Not visited.

Mark Morrisson, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (copy at holywatcher.narod.ru/alchimia.pdf), positive

  • The book's text (Oxford University Press, 2007 [memory, high]) was read to find the 1913 episode; the copy was deleted after reading (third-party upload, copyright). Summary with short quotes:
  • Ramsay announced helium in used X-ray bulbs at the Chemical Society in January 1913; Collie (University College London) and Hubert S. Patterson (Leeds) reported helium and neon after passing discharges through hydrogen; E. C. C. Baly (Liverpool) called the case for atomic disintegration "overwhelmingly strong"; Irvine Masson said his experiments verified the "facts". [web]
  • Collie and Patterson kept publishing replies to contamination objections "raised by Thomson and others (occluded gases, permeable glass, and neon-contaminated hydrogen and oxygen)". [web]
  • Arthur Smithells (Leeds, FRS) left an unpublished record of the 6 Feb 1913 Chemical Society meeting (applause "beyond anything I had ever heard at a scientific meeting"). [web]
  • At the March 1913 Chemical Society dinner, President Percy Frankland said Thomson "had entered the field of analytical chemistry, and had invented an absolutely new system of chemical analysis"; Morrisson counts Thomson, Strutt and Rutherford as the physicists who opposed the transmutation claims. [web]
  • A. E. Waite told the Alchemical Society on 14 Feb 1913 that the transmutation claim was "subject, of course, to the validity of Prof. Sir J. J. Thomson's alternative contention". [web]
  • Morrisson also notes the Collie-Patterson-Masson claims were "briefly revived" later by R. W. Riding and E. C. C. Baly. [web, search snippet]
  • Bears on claim 5: it places Thomson's 1913 helium/neon chapter inside a live controversy, with Thomson as the leading physicist on the "liberated, not created" side.

Project Gutenberg: H. Stanley Redgrove, Alchemy: Ancient and Modern (2nd ed., 1922), positive

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43240/43240-h/43240-h.htm (text: research/pages/redgrove-43240.txt) - Preface to the 2nd edition: Ramsay (helium) and Collie and Patterson (neon) "thought they had obtained evidence" of transmutation by electric discharge in 1913, but "these observations ... failed to be satisfactorily confirmed"; footnote cites "especially the report of negative experiments by Mr. A. C. G. Egerton", Proc. Roy. Soc. A 91 (1915), 180 ff.; Redgrove suggests that after Rutherford's 1919 disintegration of nitrogen "a further repetition of Ramsay's experiments would certainly appear to be advisable". [web] - Redgrove (a Fellow of the Chemical Society and a founder of the Alchemical Society) is a contemporary non-mainstream commentator. Also names Thomson and Aston as discoverers that neon is a mixture (isotopes). [web]

The Alchemy Web Site: Robert A. Nelson, Adept Alchemy, Part II, ch. 6, "The Transmutation of Hydrogen to Helium & Neon", positive

https://www.alchemywebsite.com/nelson2_6.html (script fetch failed; read in Chrome) - Nelson (a modern alternative-science author) writes that dozens of papers 1905-1927 reported hydrogen, helium and neon appearing in vacuum tubes and "The matter never has been resolved"; first report Clarence Skinner, Phys. Rev., July 1905. [web; Nelson's characterization] - On Thomson: lists his Nature letter of 13 Feb 1913; says Thomson used the positive-ray method because it is more sensitive than spectral analysis; X3 line 3 seen in H, N, He, O and air; Ne line 20 in H, N, O, HCl and air; a line at 10 probably doubly charged neon. Nelson calls X3 "tritium", which is his own identification (Thomson called it X3 or H3; Kragh and others identify it with H3+). [web] - Bibliography (useful for the next run): Strutt, Proc. Roy. Soc. A 89: 499-506 (2 Feb 1914), "Attempts to observe the production of neon or helium by electric discharge"; Merton, Proc. Roy. Soc. A 90: 549-553 (1914), "Attempts to produce the rare gases by electric discharge"; Collie's reply, ibid. 554-556; Collie, Patterson and Masson, Proc. Roy. Soc. A 91: 30-45 (1914); Egerton, Proc. Roy. Soc. A 91: 180-189 (1 Mar 1915); Harkins and Wilson, Phil. Mag. 30: 723-734 (1915); Winchester, Phys. Rev. 3: 287-294 (1914); Allison and Harkins, JACS 46: 814-824 (1924), "The absence of helium from the gases left after the passage of electrical discharges..."; Tolman, JACS 44: 1902-1908 (1922), thermodynamics of helium from hydrogen; Thomson, Nature 91: 333-337 (29 May 1913); Thomson, Proc. Roy. Soc. A 101: 290-299 (1922); Baly, Annual Reports for 1914, 11: 41-49 and for 1920, 17: 28-35. [web] - Bears on claim 5: the full set of replication and non-replication papers on helium/neon in discharge tubes, 1913-1924, both sides.

New Energy Times: "Key Replications and Historical LENR Research Papers", negative for Thomson

https://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/reports/Selected-LENR-Research-Papers.shtml (curl got a stub; read in Chrome) - Lists Ramsay and Travers 1897; Wendt and Irion 1922 (JACS 44(9): 1887-1894, exploding tungsten wires); Paneth and Peters 1926 (hydrogen into helium); Coehn. No entry for Thomson, Collie, Patterson, Egerton, Merton or Strutt (word counts 0). [web] The low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) community's historical list starts its transmutation-by-discharge record elsewhere; the 1913 discharge-tube work is absent there. - Search results also showed LENR authors citing Wendt and Irion (European Open Science 2025 "Review of Condensed-Matter Nucleosynthesis"; lenrexplained.com; Parkhomov tables). [web, snippets] Related work (priority 3) to claim 5 through Thomson's 1922 deflagrated-metals test.

LENR Forum ("LENR - before Fleischmann and Pons" thread), blocked

Royal Society of Chemistry (pubs.rsc.org), blocked

  • Baly, "Inorganic chemistry", Annual Reports 1914 (doi 10.1039/AR9141100034): snippet "The work of Collie and Patterson and of Sir J. J. Thomson on the production of helium and neon in vacuum tubes during the passage of..."; the 1920 Annual Report (ar9201700027) snippet: "Thomson, Collie, Patterson, and Masson stated that helium and neon are produced in hydrogen-filled vacuum tubes". PDF requests redirect to RSC sign-in (SSO); not read. Retry later or obtain through a library.

Wiley Online Library: H. Kragh, "A Controversial Molecule: The Early History of Triatomic Hydrogen", Centaurus 53(4): 257-279 (2011), positive (abstract)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1600-0498.2011.00237.x - Abstract: the H3 hypothesis "originated in the early 1910s in connection with J. J. Thomson's experiments on positive rays"; it seemed justified by Bohr's theory; some believed they had confirmed neutral H3 as "active hydrogen"; results were contradictory; by the early 1930s theory and experiment "spoke against its existence"; the paper follows H3 and H3+ from 1911 to about 1935 and links to the 1979 discovery of the H3 spectrum and the astronomical importance of H3+. [web] - A Charles University thesis (snippet) says Thomson kept the name X3 "in his papers until 1937 [Thomson 1937]". [web, Google snippet; not opened]

arXiv: Tim LaFave Jr, "Correspondences between the Classical Electrostatic Thomson Problem and Atomic Electronic Structure" (arXiv:1403.2591; J. Electrostatics 71(6): 1029-1035, 2013), positive

https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.2591 - Abstract: non-uniformities in the energy needed to change configurations of N <= 100 electrons on a sphere correspond to atomic shell-filling patterns, "electron energy pairs", and a pattern that "coincides with size-normalized empirical ionization energies"; the author conjectures that spatial symmetry limits on charges in a sphere are a mechanism behind shell filling "and the Periodic Law". [web] - Not downloaded (open-access PDF at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.2591; downloading needs the owner's approval). - Bears on claim 4 (rings of corpuscles in a positive sphere account for the periodic law): a modern author who argues that Thomson's classical electrostatic picture carries part of the periodic pattern. This is support by others in a limited, modern form (classical charges on a sphere, the "Thomson problem").

Wikipedia, positive (background and pointers)

Raw wikitext saved to research/pages/wiki-*.txt. - Thomson problem: minimum-energy arrangement of N electrons on a sphere; tied to Smale's 7th problem; "a natural consequence" of the plum-pudding model without the positive background (Levin and Arenzon 2003, Europhys. Lett. 63, 415); cites LaFave 2013 for shell-filling correspondences. [web] - Plum pudding model: Thomson never used the "plum pudding" analogy (Hon and Goldstein 2013); 1904 paper "On the Structure of the Atom"; Thomson then believed all of the atom's mass was carried by electrons; 1906 three methods reduced the count. [web] - Trihydrogen cation: "first discovered by J. J. Thomson in 1911", citing Proc. Roy. Soc. A 89, 1-20 (1913). [web] - Electromagnetic mass: the "4/3 problem" and Poincare stresses (1905-06), the later fate of the electromagnetic mass programme of claim 2. [web] - Vortex theory of the atom: Kelvin 1867, Tait's smoke rings; popular among British physicists 1870-1890. [web] Background to claim 6.

Crossref API (api.crossref.org), positive (bibliographic)

  • Found DOIs for Thomson's Proc. Roy. Soc. A papers 1913-1923 (see royal-society note) and Phil. Mag. "A suggestion as to the structure of light" (48: 737-746, Oct 1924) and "The structure of light" (50: 1181-1196, Dec 1925).
  • C. N. Wall, "The selection principle: a development based upon the Stokes-Thomson pulse theory", Phil. Mag. 48: 378-383 (Sept 1924), doi 10.1080/14786442408634501. [web] Work by others extending claim 3's pulse theory in 1924; not read.
  • J. Navarro, "Electron diffraction chez Thomson: early responses to quantum physics in Britain", BJHS 43 (2010), doi 10.1017/S0007087410000026. Abstract: G. P. Thomson's 1927 electron-diffraction photographs were "an initially unforeseen spin-off from a project he had started in Cambridge with his father" on positive rays; both were trained in the classical Cambridge Tripos tradition, which shaped their reading of quantum physics. [web] Historical record; bears on how J. J.'s Faraday-tube views met quantum theory.