I made a URANIUM Cloud Chamber

well that is certainly radioactive you know what that means time to break out the alcohol no really now entering the facility cars walls jelly donuts roads kevin crippling social anxiety many things that you interact with on a daily basis are thankfully made up of stable atoms most items you interact with in fact and that is to say over time the relative positions of the particles the protons and the neutrons inside the nuclei of these atoms doesn't change over time but like posts on 4chan many of the elements that make up matter are unstable over time the nuclei of these typically larger atoms emits particles of itself and radiation outwards in random directions on a pathway towards greater stability this is what radioactivity is and it's the process at work whenever you hear about the decomposition of radon or plutonium and the like and i think the human fascination with radiation and radioactivity comes down to two things one it's very dangerous and two it's very invisible well it's invisible unless you're very clever like nobel prize winning clever which we will be getting today but first i guess i need something decently radioactive one sec why kyle is on a watch list in three two one this is a hunk of uranium ore i got it from don't worry about it and it undergoes around 10 000 nuclear decay events every second which is on the low end if you can believe it don't worry it's fine that i'm holding it like this just maybe not so close to my brain with the proper equipment you can easily verify its radioactivity but again you can't see anything happening so you're not really appreciating what's going on and not getting why nuclear physics in this regard is so dang cool so now we're gonna follow in the footsteps of some brilliant scientists and try to make the invisible visible at the very end of the 19th century scottish physicist charles wilson was working on a tabletop device that could form clouds and then study their optical properties in his little chamber by 1911 he had perfected a way to create little clouds of water vapor and he discovered that ions or charged particles were great as sources for accumulating this water vapor and therefore clouds and that these ions could be created in turn by of course ionizing radiation but the very same radiation that comes out of radioactive material and so in practice a wilson cloud chamber could visualize for anyone who wanted to see the actual paths taken by radiation from radioactive materials in the form of cloud formation in 1927 both he and arthur compton another physicist won a nobel prize for this work and guess what today we are gonna build one of these from scratch we're gonna build a cloud chamber with household materials or materials you can get on the very cheap we're gonna put some uranium in it and then we're gonna hope for the best because if we do it right it's gonna look absolutely gorgeous but cut me some slack i've never done this before but i am a physics boy and of course as we always do on this show we have a list of materials if you want to follow along with us including some dry ice some isopropyl alcohol of course some black gesso some indian yellow and just a little bit of liquid white which i've primed the canvas with today we'll be making some happy little clouds slightly radioactive but very happy everybody needs a friend unless you want to beat the devil out of them thankfully this instance of nobel prize winning physics is relatively simple to do and at home with materials you can either find at home or you can buy relatively cheaply what we're going to be doing more or less is creating a sealed chamber of super saturated alcohol vapor to make clouds when radiation rampages through it to do that we're going to want to get alcohol basically everywhere like the university of arizona so if you want to follow along with me here's how we're going to make this cloud chamber i have an aquarium you can buy at any pet store for 20 or 30 bucks i cut out the top and at the bottom i put this gauze you can also use felt and this is what i'm going to pour the alcohol on to hold on to it and let the vapor from the alcohol diffuse down towards the coldest part what's the coldest part you may ask well just this simple cooking sheet that i painted black with my vantablack substitutes so we can see the trails very nicely and to my left i have the cooling source which is very very cold carbon dioxide or what you humans call dry ice i don't know to me it just makes me look like a a discount magician finally i have my isopropyl alcohol you can find this in the first aid section of uh many stores they're kind of sold out right now because you know the plague but you want the highest percentage that you can get i have 91 percent and i have powerful leds that will help illuminate the source once we see it and of course i have my source of uranium over there so there's nothing left to do but to set it all up and see what we get okay now the moment of truth we have to wait about five to ten minutes for the alcohol vapor to make its way down towards the chilled plate and then become super saturated so we can actually see the trails and that's going to take a little while i'm also going to put a large weight on the top of this because you may find that when you differentially heat a metal plate it starts to seriously warp so i'm going to put a big sandbag on top of this and we're going to wait five to ten minutes and then we'll see what we get i'm excited not irradiated yet [Music] so i've turned out the lights i've hit the uranium with some powerful leds and as you can see the vapor wow see that trail that was literally high energy radiation smashing into the alcohol vapor creating an ionized trail of alcohol again much like the university of arizona but what are we actually seeing here well ten thousand times every second we're not seeing all the pathways here alpha particles beta particles and gamma rays are shooting out in random directions from the uranium ore at random times and they ionize atoms and molecules in their way as they do so now these charged particles with a net charge then act to attract other atoms and molecules in this alcoholic mist with partial charges and then condensation happens to form these radiation trails this is probably the closest you will ever come to seeing radiation with your very own eyes so take it in not the not the radiation dose the visuals you know what i mean [Music] now i know not everyone has access to uranium but the cool thing about a cloud chamber is that even without a source of radiation inside nature provides admin what oh don't show it the military is on the phone it's about the electric barrier episode like it's not about the uranium that i have right here okay sorry just one second oh dod what up it's hilda no i i don't i i'm sorry i don't like it either not all radiation revealing vapor trails look the same different particle sizes different particle energies different interactions they all make for different looking pathways through the vape while our chunk of uranium don't worry where it got it emits mostly alpha and beta radiation for those chunky and thin trails respectively electrons alone can produce some curving tracks while transformations of muons can produce trails at nearly right angles and who knows what the heck photoelectrons are doing they're all over the place of course i'm not recommending that you hoard a bunch of different radioactive sources in your home and use them to see all the possible beautiful permutations of vapor trails through alcohol in a cloud chamber i'm just saying there's a lot more physics than we're even getting into in this program and i definitely cannot help you get uranium so do not ask me that what's that how much additional military spending in the budget do you need sure why not it's america isn't it oh hello sorry i was just talking to my like i said even if you don't have uranium and you want to build your own cloud chamber don't worry the universe provides i've kept everything the same here except i've removed the uranium ore doesn't look like much but let's look a little closer all right did you see that that little event happening every few seconds or so depending on the energy came from outer space you just saw cosmic radiation high energy protons and atomic nuclei are zipping all around the universe at all times at nearly the speed of light they are generated inside of stars by events outside of our own solar system etc what's important here is that some tiny tiny tiny fraction of them kareem towards earth smack into our atmosphere and then produce air showers of secondary particles as you see here that would be produced in something like a particle accelerator and it's these secondary particles that every so often make it all the way down to us in our very own cloud chamber the cloud chamber is a fantastic science demo and if you want to try your own hand at it i have pinned to this video some pdfs that you can use to do it yourself and if you found the footage of the uranium going off as enchanting as i did i have now uploaded an additional 4k long video of just this happening if you want to i don't know get you know have beats to get irradiated to the cloud chamber is a great example of what science does best make the universe as it really is easier to see until next time now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this video today especially i want to recognize research assistant heather crane and visiting scholar chris reese if you want to join the facility get on the staff and join over 1200 nerds who every day are chatting with me on our discord giving me episode ideas seeing episodes early getting private live streams not like that showing me photos of their pets you can go to patreon.com kyle hill right now and get on the staff today and if you support the facility just enough you get your name on arya here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the time why would i even astronaut eyes so we were talking about cosmic radiation and it's even more prevalent in outer space because we don't have the atmosphere of earth to block all the cosmic radiation and so it's widely reported by astronauts to see a few times a minute flashes in their eyes like something was tickling the retina and activating the light sensing bits and what we think this is is cosmic radiation flying into the eyeballs of astronauts through spacecraft through the international space station into the eyeballs and either creating like a cherenkov radiation situation or directly activating the rods and cones at the back of the eyes so cloud chamber is just like a very alcoholic version of an astronaut eyeball is i guess what i'm saying but not as alcoholic as the university of i shouldn't okay one sec thanks for watching university of arizona give me an honorary degree

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 200,518

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, nuclear energy, uranium, plutonium, uranium-235, cloud chamber, dry ice, nuclear, nuclear power, wilson cloud chamber, radiation, aloha, beta, gamma rays

Id: 5lgSNzzDB0Y

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020