swansont

Am-241 is an alpha source. Betas generally won't kick neutrons out of a nucleus edit:fix quote tag

It wouldn't. I imagine the concept of requiring infinite energy to travel at c for massive objects, and only massless objects - which have purely kinetic energy - travelling at c, can somehow be tortured and mangled into that statement. But it's not something I would care to watch.

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Shouldn't 7 alpha decays be [math]^{206}_{78}\mbox{Pt}[/math] ? I realize this may just be an exercise in writing out the steps' date=' but there's no way that this result is physically real. [math']^{214}_{82}\mbox{Pb}[/math] only beta decays. You have to include that, along with some other (unlikely) branching, to arrive at [math]^{206}_{80}\mbox{Hg}[/math]

You've violated spin and lepton number conservation. [math]\left.^{11}_{4} \mbox{Be}\right. \rightarrow ^{0}_{-1}\beta + \left.^{11}_{5} \mbox{B}\right + ^{0}_{0}\bar{\nu}[/math]

Why not?

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To clarify: it's not that the alphas are "weak," i.e. low energy - it's that they deposit their energy in a very small distance of travel. Internal exposure is really bad. External exposure is no big deal. Any you're right- gammas are a "whole body" dose. But I still don't recommend eating any.

Yes, but that was fairly early on - certainly not within man's time on earth, and thought to be well before that. I think the composition of the moon indicates that it was after the chemical differentiation of the core, mantle and crust, since there's not a lot of iron on the moon.

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The electron (or photon) interferes with itself. It's a wave so it goes through both slits. If you do anything that lets you know that it went through a particular slit the interference pattern goes away.

What is the purpose of the Bi? Magnetic shielding? Magnetic fields have zero divergence. What this means is that in any region of space, there will be as many flux lines entering as leaving. The lines always loop around and close in on themselves, so you can't shield one pole they way I think you want. You will concentrate the flux lines in a high-permeability material, but they leave the material, too. Also: Magnetic forces do no work.

If it's from a battery-powered toy you might have to worry about whether there is any DC-AC conversion going on before the motor that's built-in to the box. And you don't have to spin it backwards, per se. It's just whether you are providing a voltage to get motion, or motion to gat a voltage.

This is being discussed in QM.

Not to diminish the accomplishment, which is significant, but note that what happened what a teleportation of the atom's state, and not the atom itself. The atom wasn't moved across the room (or whatever) - the information contained in it, by virtue of being in a particular state - was.

No, as I stated and YT confirmed, even Th-232 radioactive, but since the half-life is long compared to the age of the earth, there is still a significant bit of it about (and anything in its decay chain should be present in some quantity as well. To be radioactive and naturally occurring it either has to have a half life longer than ~ 109 years or be continually produced somehow, either in a decay chain or an induced reaction like the one that prduces C-14) Th was (and perhaps still is) used in gas mantles because it fluoresces nicely. It's also used in high quality lenses because it makes very high index glass when added to the mix. Since the half-life is so long, you aren't going to lose that many atoms to decay.

Why is Thorium an exception? It has no stable isotopes. Th-232 is long-lived, but it still decays.