The Kelly Steph & Sophie Project Update

From MariachiWiki

Our experiment focuses on the effect location has on the rate of cosmic rays hitting the earth per minute. We wheeled Cosmic Chris around (and outside) the Physics Building to determine what effect shieliding (i.e. the building) had on the rate of cosmic rays hitting the Earth.
Graph 1: This graph shows the rate of cosmic rays bombarding the Earth versus altitude (approximated).

Graph 2:This graph shows the rate of cosmic rays versus decreased shielding.

Graph 3: This is the graph of the rates in the "classroom" of the NSL Lab.

Graph 4: This is the graph for the rates done on Thursday March 15, 2007. 

The graph for all of the trials.
...and closer up, with labels.

For reasons unknown to us, in the graph of the rates in the NSL Lab, there is one point on the graph whose error bar does not overlap with the average. Every other point on the graph does and the error of the odd point is very close to the error bar of the average. Because of this, http://www-mariachi.physics.sunysb.edu/wiki/index.php?title=The_Kelly_Steph_%26_Sophie_Project_Update&action=submitwe've decided that our data should still be fairly accurate and the odd point is not an indication that our data is worthless, but rather a reminder that nature is hard to predict and even harder to perfectly organize.

It appears that our group is becoming more knowledgeable about cosmic rays because our data from thursday confirmed our pre-experiment predictions. We assumed that the rates would be higher outside of the building because the rays would not have to penetrate through concrete and plaster. We also thought there would be a lower rate of cosmic rays being counted when we were near the elevator on the S Floor rather than in the NSL Lab that was also on the S Level. While both of these areas are underground, the elevator is underneath the whole Physics building while the NSL Lab has only a roof over it and then its exposed to the atmosphere. From our previous data collected earlier, we saw that the higher up the floor we were measuring on, the more counts we saw in 60 seconds. Thus it was easy to hypothesize that the rate on the ground floor would be more than the two underground rates.

                                        Proof that Steph did go to Albany Day!