Everything Matters | Copper | Ron Hipschman | Exploratorium

[Music] good evening and welcome to the Exploratorium - after dark and to this presentation of everything matters tales from the periodic table certainly our longest titled talk ever in the history of the museum I'm Ron hips Minh and I'm going to be your host tonight for everything matters and tonight our element is copper so we have made it quite a bit of the way through the periodic table now well we're getting to get to the some of the really interesting stuff I hope that you all got your collectable cards you got your copper card and you'll learn why both of those things are on the card tonight if you are filling in and you haven't been to everything matters before I believe that some or all of the previous 28 cards maybe over on the tables at the entry to the phyllis c wadis webcasts to do so collect them all they're kind of like Pokemon so how many people have been to after dark before raise your hand oh how was your first time we'll do the compliment cool okay so there's something that is really an amazing thing that we have here we have an after dark membership which if you join as an after dark member it entitles you to come to 52 after darks which would be like a buck apiece or less actually so it's a really great deal so if you enjoy yourself tonight consider the after dark membership it's very cool so tonight's program on copper it's about we're gonna do about sixty minutes half me and I have another speaker here I'm going to talk really sort of a little bit about the the qualities of copper and its history and where it comes from and and some of the uses of copper and then we have a guest speaker Ashley Adams and she is doing research on spiders and she's going to talk to us about how spiders are related to copper and it may surprise you so let's begin copper is quite we're making our way down through the periodic table right there in the periodic table it's number element number 29 it's atomic number 29 that just means that it has 29 protons in the nucleus and it has a variable number of neutrons and we'll get to that later but if it has 29 protons its copper it tastes like copper it's acts like copper it quacks like copper so that's what says it's copper is the number of protons in the nucleus because that means there's also 29 electrons surrounding that nucleus now copper was was one of the very few metals that has actually occurs in nature natively and it was occurred on the island of Cyprus so it was given this name which really kind of means metal of Cyprus but that kind of got changed around became Cupra m-- which is a Latin I believe and then that got changed to copper so it's been known for a long long time excuse me I got a coffee we go there we go it's mined in lots of different places in the world and there are some beautiful beautiful beautiful minerals that are associated with copper because copper produces these beautiful colors mainly blues and greens one of the prettiest that I've seen is this as you're right I have that piece right here that is actually not really enhanced and unfortunately the light here is kind of yellow the lights aren't turned up all the way so you really can't see the blue blue blue of this in this lighting but if you took this out in the sunlight that's just like the bluest blue you could possibly imagine it's just amazing stuff that's azurite and it's as right as a as a carbonate of copper there's another carbonate of copper which is called as chalcopyrite malachite I'm sorry cockle Pyrates coming up this is malachite and this is a polished piece right here which I stole from our store so if you really like this piece it's available after the after the show I will have to somehow get it back to the store though I promised them I would return it but it cruises these beautiful greenish color minerals malachite there's one more that I really think is really beautiful in its chalcopyrite orb or night which is a copper iron sulfide and that's this beautiful color that turns it has such a surface color really this turns all kinds of shades of blue and and violet and kind of reminds you of peacock it's often called peacock or but if you freshly break it it actually kind of has a golden color to it kind of like a pyrite actually so this also is I stole this from the store just in case anybody's interested that's a lot cheaper also copper occurs natively you can actually go out and find you can find the metal laying around oops there we go this is a piece of native copper feel this is this is a pretty solid piece if you come up and lift it you'll see this pretty Sutton it's pretty heavy here's another piece that's native copper actually maybe that's both of these up here so copper is one of the few metals that actually occur in nature directly as a usable metal and because of that it was really used from 8,000 BC and hammered into various forms it was the first metal to be cast into a shape using a mold around 4000 BC and the first metal to be actually a Lloyd and mixed with other metals to create bronze in this case in 3500 BC so the the largest mass I have to read this because I have to get make sure I get it right the largest mass of elemental copper discovered weighed four hundred and twenty tons and was found in 1857 in Michigan so that was that's a big nugget 420 tons couldn't find a picture of it it's found in all over the world really here's a sort of where it's mined but it's found all over the world you can see the largest mined there in green is in Chile actually here's kind of the where copper is produced from so Chile produces 30 percent of the copper in the world very important source and if we look at where it has also has some remarkable things about it in a place called chuquicamata there is a mine let's go there and look at it that is actually the largest open pit mine in the world sort of in northern Chile if we zoom in a little bit more I firstly the projectors aren't showing it very well but there's a little squares down here that are barely visible and those are these giant trucks with tires the size of houses so this is a big mine here's another one that's a nearby and I just wanted to bring this one up because this one you can see some of the beautiful green colored that's coming from the the copper some of the salts of the copper as it leeches out of the tail tailings so if we look at the production over time here you can see that Chile became a major producer in the 2000s and now produces all as I said about 30% of the the copper and our copper usage in general has gone up quite exponentially which means that we're gonna be in trouble soon one of these days we're gonna reach peak copper because you cannot grow exponentially in a finite environment that's that's the rule so eventually we're gonna run out there if we don't treat it well but 80% actually is a stunning amount 80% of all copper is recycled that's a really good amount most copper is used in electrical work we'll get to that and then a few that the corrosion resistance aesthetics I like that one but structural and heat transfer coppers a really good conductor of not just electricity but heat so it's we can talk about that a little bit so if we look at where how much copper there is in the universe it's not a lot it's the twenty seventh most abundant element in the universe making up only six million seven percent of the universe if we look at the in the Sun you'd expect it to be the same more or less the same because the Sun was made out of the stuff the universe is made out of and so it's actually the twenty fourth most abundant element in the Sun but if you look in meteorites it's actually the twenty-first most abundant element because a lot of meteorites are solid metal and there's iron nickel meteorites and that does contain some copper as well in the crust of the earth it's again the 24th most abundant element again not the most it's fairly rare it makes up only 50 parts per million of the Earth's crust but that's again taken as the entire Earth's crust altogether it's concentrated in areas obviously 26 the most abundant element in the oceans very very rare in the oceans and it's the 20th out of 41 elements in the human body so we do need it it's in there copper is produced in supernova explosions and in white dwarf explosions so it has to be made in exploding stars so all the copper on earth comes from exploding stars it was its second generation elements everything past iron has to be made in exploding stars or emerging neutron stars now it's actually a new data the green stuff down here that's all kind of new data they just observed using Lego these neutron stars merging and they figure that's where they figured out that's where most of the heavy elements are actually made so I mentioned that there are varying numbers of neutrons in the nucleus so there's 29 protons but there can be lots of different combinations of neutrons now these are called isotopes ISO for the same topes location same location in the periodic table but if you add up the number of protons 29 plus the number of neutrons then that's what you that's what this number is all about so you can see you get everywhere from 52 to 80 so 29 different isotopes of copper there's a lot of isotopes however these are all if you treat these things chemically you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them they all act the same because there are electron structure which is where all chemistry resides in the electrons is the same only two of those however are not radioactive and that would be copper 63 and copper 65 so there's two forms of stable copper in the universe and they are created at in different amounts so copper 63 is about 70% of all the copper in the universe and well at least on the earth and copper 65 is the other 30% now the other ones the radioactive ones some of them are more radioactive than the others so we can actually take a look at that these are the longest half-lives what is a half-life if I have a lump of copper 67 for instance half of that lump would decay in sixty one point eight three hours so and in another sixty one 0.83 hours half of what we left or quarter would be left after two half-lives and so on and so on so you can see all these half-lives are fairly short unlike uranium your in uranium 238 has a half-life of four and a half billion years so the earth is about four and a half billion years old so about half the uranium 238 that we started out with is still with us today now one of those isotopes copper 62 is actually used in PET scan machines this is a specific kind of PET scan called a PT sm from the chemical that they inject into the copper is a radioactive tracer and it emits positrons that's what the P and the PET scan stands for positron emission tomography and using this they can actually image tumor blood flow and how to blood flow comes into the tumor and out of the tumor so it's a copper is an important element in PET scans so if we look at the metal itself we've already seen some of the metal already copper is this beautiful reddish golden color it's actually only one of a few of the metal elements that have a color other than gray or silver and if you take a copper pipe and you polish it which I did this is sort of nice clean copper this is sort of what it looks like I can pass these around I'll pass one each way nice clean copper has a nice feel to it has a nice heft to it here's a this was from an ingot of of copper that was sliced in half and this was made with very little oxygen and it was cooled very slowly so the crystals had a chance to grow in this copper so this is kind of very special we used to have a slice just like that I can't find it anymore oh well if you want to see the giant piece of copper here at the Exploratorium your only bet your best bet is at this exhibit here which is called floating in copper and that's over in the South gallery on the other side where all the electricity exhibits are so this is our largest piece of copper on the floor I just thought I'd mention that some of the qualities of copper it's pretty dense about 9 grams per cubic centimeter that's pretty dense remember what water was what's water 1 right and here's a few more here and I have a whole bunch of blocks up here more or less the same size I'm one of these days and come up after and feel the block the blocks and even though they're the same size they weigh different amounts the hot you see the biggest 9 grams per cubic centimeter the densest element is osmium which we won't get to for years and years and years but that's 22 grams per cubic centimeter but here we go up to tungsten which is 19 grams per cubic centimeter so that's actually super dense if you lift that be very careful it that little brick at the end weighs a lot if don't drop it on your foot it will leave a mark here's kind of a chart of the densities from the most to the least dense and so Tungsten's way up there then we go to lead and copper and iron and aluminum and magnesium oops I skipped one somewhere titanium I skipped and there's copper again so copper is sort of mid between the light ones and the really really heavy ones it's a really soft metal if we look at it on the Mohs scale of hardness it's it's pretty soft it's a number three so you can scratch copper with almost anything with your teeth actually so it's it's pretty soft one of its really cool qualities is that copper is a really good conductor of electricity so here's a chart with the best conductors - the worst conductors so you might imagine the worst conductors like gases and things like that down at this end here but the best conductors are up here and copper is the second best conductor of electricity it's just bare under silver but there's a reason we don't use silver wires in our houses because it's a little more expensive than copper silver and it's only a little bit better conductive conductor and also silver tarnishes it's much more chemically active than copper is so silver wouldn't work very well so copper wire in our house is the rule and I'm sure you've all seen copper wire I didn't have to bring any here for you because it's pretty common stuff but not only is copper a good conductor of electricity but for the same reason those loosely connected electrons will on the outside it's also a great conductor of heat this chart looks just like the one we just saw and but this is in this is in order of conductivity of heat and copper is right where it was before just under silver silver is a better conductor of heat that means that sterling silver spoons are probably not very good for your hot hot tea because the handle will get really hot neither wood copper spoons be very good either might give you a aftertaste copper so if it's a good conductor of heat that's useful as well not only can we conduct electricity with copper but if we have something that's really hot we want to suck the heat away from it we can do that with copper and this here is one of those things if you have a computer at home you'll notice that there might be something this came from a server that I took apart this is a heat sink this sits on top of the CPU chip which is in contact thermal contact right here with the base and the heat gets sucked up into this and then fans blow through the fins and cool off the chip it's a great conductor of heat here's another there's another heatsink this one you might be more familiar with inside of your computers this looks more familiar to people who do computer stuff and it also has a nice slug of copper at the bottom that goes on top of the CPU and then that heats up this piece of copper and notice those copper tubes here those are actually not just solid copper they're hollow copper and they have cause inside of them and that actually and this actually has a gas inside there that actually conducts heat these are called heat pipes and they conduct heat up to the these fins here which are then cooled off so that's kind of more typical heat sink you might find in a computer but it does still involve copper to get that heat away from the CPU at home I use copper to cook with because it's a good conductor I have a set of Revere where is not a commercial Revere where pots and pans at home and these are stainless steel pots and pans but they have a copper cladding along the bottom here's a piece of my my cookware from home and so you see this cladding is kind of placed on the bottom of the pan it's kind of welded in place and when the heat hits this copper the copper spreads it out evenly along the bottom of the pan which means that my egg cooks evenly in the middle of the pan and I don't get hot spots so you don't get a piece of really super done white and a and a charred yolk because there's a flame in the middle this spreads the heat out because it conducts the heat evenly across the pan and I believe we have an exhibit here if it's out on the floor called skillets I it was in the shop but it may have gone out I hope it went out so copper as I mentioned is moderately rare but it's not super rare which means that copper only costs about about three dollars and 10 cents a pound so not too expensive definitely more than aluminum or iron and that varies in price that's one of those metals that's followed by the spot metal people so you can get online and you can see how this price has changed over time so just during this time here you can see here from oh the slide is not big enough for me to see here so this is like September September of last year that it went down but in November of last year I mean it went up it spiked up for some reason who knows why maybe a mine closed down or something like that but you could follow along the copper price about three dollars and 10 cents a pound the copper atom is fairly large because it has those free electrons hanging on the outside compared to the hydrogen atom anyway and it has a pretty complex spectrum this is the periodic table of spectra and if you looked at magnified the copper spectrum you can see it's got a lot of bright lines in it it's pretty complicated iron was another one of those that had a complicated spectrum so I think from now on we're gonna see some pretty complicated spectrum the Sun you could actually see copper in the sun's spectrum if we look at here's the Sun spectrum now this one is kind of I'm circling the copper lines in the Sun solar spectrum but this is kind of stacked this would be a really long spectrum it would be hundreds of feet long but we just I stacked up the things here this is from Kitt Peak Observatory and so there's a few lines in the visible part of the spectrum that are from copper right there and there so copper exists in the solar atmosphere as we talked about just a little bit before it is in the Sun this is how we tell it's in the Sun is by looking at the spectrum of the Sun so what's it used for everybody knows uses for copper I've already shown you one copper pipes everybody's pretty much everybody's got copper pipes in their house they last forever and they're they're pretty rugged they're easy to piece together they're easy to cut because it's soft and malleable you can solder them together it's there it's just a nice substance to make pipes out of it doesn't poison you like lead pipes and it like they're having a problem in Flint Michigan now or the Romans so it it does a it's a it's just a good substance to make pipes out of PVC tends to not last quite as long a little too soft but I have another piece here of practical use copper but it's probably not as common as using copper pipes in your house this piece here which is a beautiful cast and forged of copper is actually a piece of a linear accelerator this linear this is just a piece they put a bunch of these together with brazing disks between and I put them in an oven and they all get joined together this linear accelerator is used in a cancer radiotherapy machine here's that here's what it looks like when it's all put together and this goes into one of these radiotherapy machines which I think are a modern miracle here you lay down on the table and if you need radiotherapy you need x-ray therapy for a tumor this machine can actually shape the x-ray beam to the same shape of the tumor as it's that is pointing at in other words they take a 3d model they make a 3d model of your tumor using a cat scan or a PET scan and once that 3d they have a 3d model of the tumor they actually shaped the beam so as it moves around you the shape changes because you're looking at different aspects of the tumor but you're only exposing the tumors all those x-rays you're exposing the rest of your body to far less radiation and these are manufactured right down in Palo Alto by a company called Varian who is down there before HP actually shocking actually here's where it is in the there's the accelerator right there in the head then it beam gets a shape bent and then shaped here you see a tumor shaped beam there so it's also you copper is also used in construction some places if you have a lot of money you can put a roof on your building that's made out of copper and here it doesn't look all shiny here but because it's been out in the weather a lot it has changed chemically to have a beautiful green patina on it this was this is Minneapolis City Hall and has a nice copper clad roof that they won't have to replace for probably 100 200 years we have buildings here in the city that are very copper very coppery - one of our sister museums in Golden Gate Park for instance the DeYoung is completely clad in copper right here this was far enough along in its in its aging to have aged into this black copper oxide if you start off here's the side of the building when you start off it's really shiny shiny copper like the pipes I passed around and then it starts going this reddish copper oxide color eventually it goes black and you can see that the young is beginning to get this beautiful green patina as well that the young by the way the copper skin on the Gion they used over a million pounds of copper 2,200 cubic feet of copper on that building the nice thing about what's happening here those once you get that coating it it kind of protects the copper underneath and so that oxide is is really a protectant aluminum does the same thing is called passivation when you get that oxide coating on the copper probably the most famous example of a green coated structure of course would be the Statue of Liberty which is coated with copper and has that beautiful copper patina as well that green copper stuff is called verdigris that's the green copper carbonate and you see it all basically all copper structures so we mentioned that you can actually mix copper with other metals if you mix copper with this which is tin you get bronze you get this this is a from this is a spare from an exhibit we have your called oddly enough bronze hand I think we missed an opportunity here I think they shouldn't have done it like this they should have done it more like this but that's just me so bronze we have a couple of really nice bronze exhibits in the museum out front we have Archimedes the dishes this the whispering dishes and when we opened here at the Museum we worked with the crucible over in Oakland and they cast us a beautiful bronze l which is outside right out here just outside the door here and of course bronze has been used for statues since for thousands of years now the bronze since the bronze age I would guess don't quote me now if you mix copper not with tin but with zinc this is zinc you don't get bronze you get a different alloy you get brass and brass of course is very famous for being made into instruments and I think I have a I have another instrument here that was made out of brass or maybe it's not here anymore where did it go oh well I had a brass bell up here it's not here I forgot to mention about the conductivity using in wires but also there's flat wires this is a circuit board and on the back of the circuit board I'm gonna go I'm I'm digressing here a bit forgot a prop on the back of the circuit board there are wires that are actually bonded on to this green fiberglass and those wires are actually copper they look silvery here because they've been plated with nickel to keep them from from corroding but this probably this circuit board was from my first computer I want you to know this is a 4k k memory board 4096 bytes have you populated your current computer with these boards it would take a quarter million of these boards just for one gigabyte and that would cut it would cost you probably about 200 million dollars for them RAM in your computer if you did it this way and you'd have to have and you'd have to have a dam to run it this was a s100 computer back in the good old days CPM anyone ran say p.m. alright a few people probably sinned the late 70s yeah okay I still have my s 100 machine at home it's still boots off 8-inch floppy okay one more interesting thing that I'm gonna that we're going to talk more about tonight is the use copper in blood now we're used to not copper in our blood we're used to iron we have hemoglobin and there's a iron atom in the middle of that molecule but certain animals as you can see here have a couple of copper atoms in their oxygen carrying molecule which by the way is not bound inside of a cell it just is free in their blood and that creates not red blood but blue blood and one of those creatures is a crustacean which is the horseshoe crab which is actually and here they are bleeding horseshoe crabs and that is their blood they're that blue liquid going into what look like milk bottles is horseshoe crab blood now they don't kill the horseshoe crabs they just take a little bit of blood and then they throw them back and this is not called hemoglobin this is called hemocyanin and this is used to carry oxygen through the blood and because of the presence of copper their blood is not red it's blue and this is actually used in medicine as a test for bacteria if there are bacteria in a sample of whatever if it's on equipment or if it's in an injectable if you mix some of this oil some of the product from this not the actual blood it will there's a clotting agent that will clot it up if there are bacteria so almost everybody can thank the humble horseshoe crab for not having bacteria injected into them that you wouldn't you wouldn't want that prior to 1977 when this process became useful there was a much slower process that and was more expensive because they had to use bunny rabbits so bunny rabbits or horseshoe crabs you'll have to make a choice here copper does appear it's essential to all living organisms it's just a trace in your dietary supplement people who have a macular degeneration there's some copper that you take in your vitamins there and you take zinc as well it's a key constituent in a respiratory and enzyme in you so you need it it's in humans it's found mainly in the liver the muscle and the bone and your bodies contain about 1.4 and 2.1 milligrams per kilogram of body weight so you do have a you know just a few milligrams of copper in you not not even a gram okay so when we think about copper a lot we think about coins the nickel you don't normally think about copper when you think about the nickel that the copper is actually it's actually 75% copper the modern nickel it's only 25% nickel so the nickel should be called a copper the quarter is actually has a hundred percent copper in the center of at the current quarter since 1965 before that they were silver but now our now our money actually doesn't it isn't it doesn't have any factual value and it's copper it's a nickel copper plating so if you look sad ways at a cut at a quarter you'll notice the copper in the middle that's 100% copper in the middle now the penny the penny is of course looks like copper and the 2018 penny we'll get to that originally in 1793 to 1837 it was a hundred percent copper but then they started mixing other metals in for corrosion resistance and make it a little harder to wear down so we had copper with 5% tin and zinc which is kind of a coop row a kind of a bronze brass mixture and then it went to an AE eight percent copper to twelve percent nickel cupro-nickel from most modern well not most modern but up till 1962 they were 95 percent copper and just five percent tin and zinc so that was pretty good so if you go back and look at your pennies before 1962 they're mostly copper now 1943 there was an exception they made pennies out of steel because during the war the copper all went to the war effort but that's just an exception at just 1943 but then after 1962 they went to back to the same mixture again and today shockingly after 1982 pennies are only two and a half percent copper and mostly zinc they're zinc on the inside you can actually drain the zinc out of a penny if you drill a hole top and bottom hold it in players and apply a torch and the zinc will drain out of the penny you can try that at home be careful last month we did will last everything matters we did nickel and I nickel plated copper pennies so the pennies came out silver excuse me to be fair this month I figure it's only fair to take nickels and copperplate them with well put and copperplate them to make them coppery that's easy you can do this at home you just take a bath into that bath you dissolve copper sulfate you have to you put it in a copper electrode bring out a battery you attach the positive to the copper and the negative to the nickel and then copper ions flow from the copper electrode to the nickel and slowly but surely the cop the nickel gets copper plated so I have nickel plated pennies and copper plated nickels and here's there's some of them are up here you can sort of see its head it's coppery here's something that's here's one that's only half I don't know if I can show this to the camera or not this one's only half plated actually here I show you a slide there's a half plated nickel and I I'm not happy with the way these came out by the way the nickel plated pennies came out really shiny but the copper plated nickel I'm getting very confused talking about this the copper plated nickel came out kind of matte I think the crystals are growing out of the the the nickels themselves the best my fanciest example of copper plating that someone showed me just the other day I'm so happy they did is the copper chopper by artist Paul Yaffe and this is a beautiful piece of artwork where he copper plated everything he could copper plate on the chopper so I want to leave you now with a elemental haiku from Mary soonly before the bronze age before history began bent to the Smiths need next month we move on to the next element element number 30 zinc zinc yes and that will be next month June 21st at 8 o'clock I also do a talk called everything matters I'm sorry that called full spectrum science and since the next one here is in June that I'm sorry this month is going to be sound I'm sorry I'm doing sound this month it's the fourth Thursday and the fourth Sunday of the month and I have the wrong slide so I can but I can give you a preview of what's coming up in June what's coming up in June we're gonna talk about how fireworks work so that's gonna be fun come out and find out how those beautiful fireworks work that's in June so we have sound this month fireworks next month and thank you very much don't go anywhere because we're gonna get at a sh Lee's stalk up here and she's gonna talk about spiders so if anybody's creeped out in the arachnophobia audience close your eyes thank you [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Exploratorium

Views: 21,265

Keywords: everything matters, exploratorium, copper, periodic table

Id: wa2GQM6Sw5M

Length: 38min 43sec (2323 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018