Category: Atoms And Radioactivity

We will conduct our experiments in the range of 10 Torr to 10 mTorr, which is easy to achieve using a low-cost, mechanical vacuum pump. Very good results have been obtained by amateur experimenters and educators using vacuum pumps made for servicing air conditioning and refrigeration units. These vacuum pumps are not part of the…

We will deal with the production and detection of subatomic particles, such as electrons and nuclei. As these interact with matter, including air, many of the experiments need to be carried out inside glass tubes out of which the air has been pumped. The normal atmospheric pressure at sea level is right around 1.0 atmosphere,…

Although physicists felt comfortable in the late 1800s with their capabilities to describe the macroscopic world, many questions remained unanswered. Lord Kelvin’s lecture on the “Nineteenth-Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light,” referred to two specific problems that interested him. Namely, he discussed the lack of physical theory to explain the speed…