Large Hadron Collider

A review of the elements indicates that a good candidate for the Rutherford Polonium alpha test would be Manganese. It has up to 7 valence positions and less than 10% of the hardness of Tungsten. A very thin film of this pure element might be practical. If it showed as much "transparency" to alpha radiation as Gold, then I am full of you know what.

Gregg Wilson

Gregg perhaps the reason Rutherford chose gold as his test metal relates to its physical properties. The very reason you chose Manganese is the reason it can't be used in this experiment. Manganese is hard and brittle, good luck pounding it into a sheet. I tried yesterday and the result was a lot of gray-silver powder on the lab table...so I tried to heat it in a crucible and pour it into a thin sheet...nope that won't work either. How precisely should someone use a substance that cannot be made into a foil in a foil experiment? Gold on the other hand can be foiled...in fact of all the elements Gold can be sheeted 4 atoms thick! This makes gold the most excellent substance I can think of from a physical standpoint. Tungsten, the other example is a Group 6 metal and even more brittle than Manganese. Vaporizing and sheeting that metal would be a neat trick, however the metallic bonds still would create a really thin sheet that should become a nice pile of powder if touched...let alone dissolved. In fact, only when alloyed with other metals like Iron, can group 6 metals be made malleable. But then foil properties are determined by the parent (Iron in this case) and we are looking at about 2000 atoms thick at best. The point of the experiment was to try to only "see" nuclei. The gold foil experiment controls for the least cross-section of nuclei possible. I understand Rutherford as being very Meta in his science. His results were incredible

Mark Vitrone

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by MarkVitrone</i>
..in fact of all the elements Gold can be sheeted 4 atoms thick!

The point of the experiment was to try to only "see" nuclei. The gold foil experiment controls for the least cross-section of nuclei possible. I understand Rutherford as being very Meta in his science. His results were incredible

Mark Vitrone
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A few points:

1) I have no ethical or professional problem with Rutherford and his experiment. We have the advantage of a century of hindsight.

2) You make my point by stating the Gold can be thinned to only 4 atoms thick. Gold is notorious as having an apparently widely varying specific gravity. Unless you want to propose "collapsed matter" the variation must come from gaps in the Gold metal matrix. At 4 atoms thick, these holes would contribute to the experimental results.

3) I have obviously recognized that Tungsten and Manganese would be incredibly resistant to hard working when I proposed vapor deposition of each of them. And I admitted that that may not work.

4) I hope you can draw the correlation between Gold having almost no chemical bonding and its being the most maleable of metals; and Tungsten and Manganese having a high degree of chemical combination with other elements and the fact they are not maleable at all. This leads, IMHO, to the gold nucleus being quite susceptible to angular momentum (rotation) whereas the other two metal nuclei would not be subject to this.

5) The reference to the alpha particle being a 15 inch shell while the gold film is tissue is ridiculous - no matter who said it. Alpha radiation is stopped by about 4 inches of air, or 0.053 mm paper, or 0.045 mm skin. Do you suppose that air is mostly "empty"?

6) When I worked at Hanford, it was well known that detecting alpha radiation sources was almost impossible, certainly highly impractical.

7) I am proposing that the nucleus within an atom is substantially larger than the current assessment has it. The burden is "proof positive" so I am not expecting anyone to accept this. But it might raise some curiousity.

Gregg Wilson

Gregg, So how can this be established?

Gregg,

Excellent listing of your conditions.

I am unclear about why Gold is not so favorable in your opinion. For near pure gold rolled out thin, its specific gravity is constant to high precision. It is a dense metal, a precious metal even. So there is little interferece from oxygen or hydrogen atoms. I am supportive of this more and more as we discuss it. Additionally for the same reasons (gold being precious in nature) there is little interference from surface chemistry on the foil. It would be difficult (barring conducting the experiment in a vacuum) to find any other metal that will not react with the air in the room and start changing throughout the experiment.

Talking about having difficulty detecting the Alpha particle. I enjoy the nice glow one makes when striking a plate of ZnS. I guess I can agree with the fact that nuclei could be larger than we estimate, but I think combining Rutherford's data with Seaborg's strict quantitative measurement of mass supports the current model. Any thoughts?

Mark Vitrone

Rutherford's experiment was done in a vacuum, though as the detector could move, it probably wasn't as good as we can now create. He also used platinum films as well. Setting up the experiment it's highly likely that he tried to make a number of films, copper and silver sound like candidates.

Bouncing a fifteen inch shell of a tissue paper means that the tissue paper has some sort of force field round it. So, to explain the experimental result we have to postulate the strong atomic force. The alpha particle touches the proton. In this environment, If quarks are forced apart we don't have an inverse law, in fact over a very smal distance the force of attraction between them rises to infinity. [] Quarks are married for life then.

Now, the question is, postulate the strong atomic force and also the weak atomic force, on the basis that no faster than light transactions can occur and the model may work but we'll inevitably end up with a model that looks like the crystal sphere model of the solar system.

(Edited) CERN want to collide two beams of hadrons, gold atoms as it happens, into each other at tremendous energies. This to create a phase transition. Rather like the pouring in of energy into ice to get it to melt. A few people have expressed concern about this. The counter argument to this concern, is that gamma rays can collide at greater energies and they don't create a phase transition that causes a phase chain reaction. We'll know soon enough, November the 26th is the first fullo scale test.

I think that ftl transactions, mean that in no way can we bash enough energy into the machine to get a chain reaction phase change. But, I'm always wrong about everything[]