Nuclear physics

We should start with the reminder that none of what we're talking about is so obvious that we just look really really closely at something to figure out what's going on. Like in most of science, there are infrerences and constructions of data that need to take place.

The data that you get to observe in class are:

• how charges interact with one another (from previous classes)
• a geiger counter "counting"
• a cloud chamber
• a lab in which you get to measure decay rates and half life

Of course, you can rely a bit on things that other people have done, too. So, we talk a bit about

• Rutherford, and how he discovered that there was such a thing as the nucleus
• Roentgen's incidental exposure of some film left in a drawer
• Our understanding of isotopes and their various stabilities but chemical equivalence
  • How do a bunch of protons, all of the same charge, stick together in the nucleus?
  • What happens when a nucleus gets too big?
• Einstein's description of special relativity and the mass/energy equivalence

If you understand all of this, you understand just enough to know that

• Uranium-238 and Uranium-235 are exactly the same, except that they're drastically different. Separating one from the other is a technological feat and something which separates one country from another