January 29, 2008

From MariachiWiki

I haven't taken physics since the 9th grade,so in a way this all
new to me. I didn't realized how much I learned during the first lesson of PHY 315 until I interacted with someone at work the following Saturday. I brought with me a printed copy of the Cosmic Rays page-to work. So anyway during my break, this supervisor saw me reading it, and we started talking about physics. And I told him how cool it was that the particles that come from the sun land on the atmosphere and that each particle breaks down into many particles, and those many particles keep breaking down into more particles and somehow they come down to us. This breaking down of particles are called showers.
I also told him that Prof. Marx has a wooden doll called Cosmic Jack-I think and that the doll a particle counter attached to it and could count many particles per seconds. I said that the professor placed a detector above the head of the doll, and the detector was hardly beeping: this is while the doll was standing up. But when the doll was placed in horizontal position, the detector started beeping very frequently-from what I recall. David and I laughed when I told that the professor said maybe we should sleep standing up. The professors remark was in response to my question, "Do we receive more cosmic rays while we are lying down?" In response to my question, David said that perhaps while we are standing up, the cosmic rays only land on our heads, but when we are lying down, the cosmic rays land on our whole bodies.
This comment David made makes sense to me because perhaps-even though they expand as they multiply-the cosmic rays only function vertically, or at least the strength of its magnitude affects us vertically.
Another aspect of the detector that arouse my curiosity was that the professor use the detector on one side of the room, and there seem be a high concentration of cosmic rays, but when he placed above my head, the detector beeped every few seconds. The professor did the latter in response to my question, "Is there a higher concentration of cosmic rays in certain areas of the room?"
Based on what was said in the first lesson last week, I will conclude that perhaps there was a higher concentration of cosmic rays to the left of the classroom because the container containing the alcohol swabs was in the far left of the room. The gases that the swabs release-even though they were self-contained in the glass container-made the cosmic ray particles' strength intensify
Maybe the container is intensifying the concentration of cosmic rays in the entire classroom, but the closer you get to the container with the detector, the more cosmic rays it will detect. The further away you get,the fewer cosmic rays will be detected.