Cloud Chamber: The Birth of Helium Atoms
On the last day of recording the 2012 Christmas Lectures Dr Peter Wothers illustrates the properties of Air with a beautiful demo from his final Lecture. The Cloud Chamber shows the natural...
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[MUSIC PLAYING] So here we are on the last day of the recording for the Christmas Lectures, but I thought I'd take an opportunity to point this out because it's so beautiful. This is a really stunning cloud chamber, and the tracks that you can see here show just the natural radiation in the atmosphere around us. So if we actually have a look in here, you can see sometimes there are thicker tracks which are big heavy alpha particles. Sometimes they're little wispy ones, which are beta particles. But all of these, they're all working in the same way. So the atmosphere in here contains a lot vapour of alcohol. And it's sort of more than it should have. And when these charged particles fire through the atmosphere in here, they caus...
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[MUSIC PLAYING] So here we are on the last day of the recording for the Christmas Lectures, but I thought I'd take an opportunity to point this out because it's so beautiful. This is a really stunning cloud chamber, and the tracks that you can see here show just the natural radiation in the atmosphere around us. So if we actually have a look in here, you can see sometimes there are thicker tracks which are big heavy alpha particles. Sometimes they're little wispy ones, which are beta particles. But all of these, they're all working in the same way. So the atmosphere in here contains a lot vapour of alcohol. And it's sort of more than it should have. And when these charged particles fire through the atmosphere in here, they caus...
