Prologue

1. In the Beginning: Hydrogen and the Big Bang

2. Hydrogen and the Unity of Matter: The Prout Hypothesis
William Prout, 1815

3. Hydrogen and the Spectra of the Chemical Elements: A Swiss High School Teacher Finds a Pattern
Johann Jakob Balmer, 1885

4. The Bohr Model of Hydrogen: A Paradigm for the Structure of Atoms
Niels Bohr, 1913

5. Relativity Meets the Quantum in the Hydrogen Atom
Arnold Sommerfeld, 1916

6. The Fine-Structure Constant: A Strange Number with Universal Significance
Arnold Sommerfeld, 1916

7. The Birth of Quantum Mechanics: The Hydrogen Atom Answers the "Crucial Question"
Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, 1925-26 * Paul Dirac, 1925-26

8. The Hydrogen Atom: Midwife to the Birth of Wave Mechanics
Erwin Schrödinger, 1926

9. The Hydrogen Atom and Dirac's Theory of the Electron
Paul Dirac, 1928

10. Hydrogen Guides Nuclear Physicists: The Discovery of Deuterium
Harold Urey, 1932

11. Hubris Meets Hydrogen: The Magnetic Moment of the Proton
Otto Stern, 1933

12. The Magnetic Resonance Method: The Origin of Magnetic Resonance Imaging
I. I. Rabi, 1938

13. New Nuclear Forces Required: The Discovery of the Quadrupole Moment of the Deuteron
Norman F. Ramsey and I. I. Rabi, 1939

14. Magnetic Resonance in Bulk Matter (NMR)
Edward M. Purcell and Felix Bloch, 1946

15. Hydrogen's Challenge to Dirac Theory: Quantum Electrodynamics as the Prototype Physical Theory
Willis Lamb, 1947

16. The Hydrogen Atom Portends an Anomaly with the Electron
I. I. Rabi, John E. Nafe, and Edward B. Nelson, 1946

17. Hydrogen Maps the Galaxy
Edward M. Purcell and Harold Ewen, 1951

18. The Hydrogen Maser: A High-Precision Clock
Norman F. Ramsey and Daniel Kleppner, 1960

19. The Rydberg Constant: A Fundamental Constant
Johannes Robert Rydberg, 1890 * Theodor Hänsch, 1992

20. The Abundance of Deuterium: A Check on Big Bang Cosmology
David N. Schramm, 1945-1997

21. Antihydrogen: The First Antiatom

22. The Bose-Einstein Condensate for Hydrogen
Satyendranath Bose, 1924 * Albert Einstein, 1925 * Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman, 1995 * Daniel Kleppner and Tom Greytak, 1998

23. Exotic Hydrogen-like Atoms: From Theory to Technology
Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

Credits

Index