radioactivity

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -Omar N. Bradley Nuclear physics is one of the most daunting, emotionally charged phrases in all of science. You can hardly say the words without the image of a mushroom cloud popping into most people's heads, followed by the devastations of radiation sickness and lingering radioactivity. Image credit: National Archives image (208-N-43888), Charles Levy, of the Nagasaki bomb. But -- as a physicist -- that's not what I think of at all. Think…
"I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man." -Jimi Hendrix Hendrix, as I told you once before, was almost right. We know of helium, conventionally, as the lighter-than-air gas that we fill balloons, blimps and zeppelins with in order to quickly and easily "defy gravity" here on Earth. Image credit: Jonathan Trappe. At least defying gravity is what it appears to do. But what's really going on is that helium is simply a very low-density gas. Our atmosphere, a mix of mostly Nitrogen (N2) and Oxygen (O2) gases, has an average…
Pierre Curie (photo from wikipedia) ... husband of Madam Dr. Maria Sklodowska-Curie, and famous scientist in his own right. Curie was an early explorer of the method of crystallography, and studied electromagnetic energy including "radioactivity."