Chapter 17

The Disappearing Spoon Chapter 17

Summary

      In this Chapter, Donald Glaser, who came to the idea of using bubbles from beer to find to conjure up exotic and fragile species of particles. Watching his beer glass, Glaser was able to take part in the creation of the Cloud chamber. 
     The chapter also moves onto smaller stories of Roman’s love of calcium. Then introducing Rutherford as basically that of an ogre but based on his radioactive experiments he became famous.Rutherford and Soddy were able to prove that elements could mutate into other elements. He then used this knowledge and discovered helium particles being produced from this decay as bubbles. This theory went on to be used as a device to help find the age of the earth by measuring the amount if helium trapped in rocks.

Reflection

     In the chapter, learning that bubbles in a glass of beer seen as a legend is pretty comical. Although it did allow Donald Glaser to discover particular particles and win a Nobel Prize at 33 years of age. But what is amusing is how a rifle shooting through water was the antithesis of Rutherford's experiment which allowed him to find out that the foil was "empty."

Guideline Questions

1. Donald Glaser revamped version of the cloud chamber which won his Nobel Prize. 

2. Rutherford went on with pure radioactivity which released new elements.

3. One way scientists figured out how old is the Universe is by the expansion of the Universe and with that they just went backward to see how far it began. The key factors in determining the Expansion of the Universe was the portion of regular and dark matter, dark energy, leftover radiation from the big bang, and the density of the universe.
http://www.space.com/24054-how-old-is-the-universe.html

4. It is considered that way because if you shoot a rifle through water, one would expect it to go through it but have less impact towards. Although that wasn't the case and the bullet stopped unlike his experiment with the foil.