But while all this was going on, while the noble gases were being used to work out all the details of stellar processes, a different argon-based experiment was sneaking in and threatening to upset the whole applecart. I first began to learn about it way back in the fading summer of 1958, when I pulled myself up off the Westhampton sands and sauntered back to the lab, angry—in my own self-importance—that Gert Friedlander had hopped off to Europe and left me on my own. You’ll remember Ray Davis, in whose lab I was to work on the iron meteorite K/Ar problem? Well, I first met him that summer when I found Ollie Schaeffer and his mass spectrometer. In the lab next door was this courtly, soft-spoken Southern gentleman, Raymond Davis, Junior, who was putting together a most unlikely experiment and who invited me to join him in his journey into the unknown. Except that it wasn’t really unknown. It was a basic part of quantum mechanics, the theory describing the inner workings of atomic nuclei, which was put together largely during the 1920s and ‘30s—some thirty years before my sojourn at Brookhaven, and which I considered a time of ancient history, not quite real. Oh, I accepted that the 1920s had really existed, but in an intellectual way only, as a sort of existential fantasy—they had happened before I was born. (I first noticed this in others when, in the 1980s, I referred during a class lecture to the Kennedy assassination and was received with blank, uninterested stares. The students knew about it, but it had happened before they were born and had the same status as the Lincoln assassination: it was true, certainly, but basically it was a story grown-ups told.) It’s hard to realize that I’m writing this now more than twice as far removed from my Brookhaven years as those years were from the beginnings of quantum mechanics. So anyhow, it was known back then that the nuclei of atoms were held together by a binding energy which can be expressed through Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2.
Simultaneous analysis of abundance and isotopic composition of nitrogen, carbon, and noble gases in lunar basalts: Insights into interior and surface processes on the Moon