Disappearing Spoon Chapter 6: Summary & Reflection

Summary:

    Plutonium has the element symbol Pu, it's atomic number is 94. Kean starts off the chapter by talking about the holes that were left on the periodic table that scientist were having a very difficult time being able to fill. Henry Moseley is brought up during this chapter for a good amount of the chapter. He is one of Ernest Rutherford's students. Moseley was admired by Charles Darwin . Moseley spent a lot of time in his lab. He was very enthusiastic about working with electron beams. He was able to find a connection between the wavelengths of X-rays and the number of protons in an element's nucleus. Moseley was able to solve the problem of having to move around elements on the periodic table in a specific order. Moseley's electron gun also helped sorting the radioactive elements. Moseley's discoveries were doubted. A man George Urbain, brought Moseley a blend of ambiguous rare earth elements and asked him to figure out what elements were there. Moseley came back within an hour with all the elements listed correctly. Moseley later on enlisted in the king's army, where he then passed.
      Kean then moves onto how atomic bombs were being produced. Kean mentions how the splitting of atoms worked and how it contributes to the making of atomic bombs. The search for elements caused sparring between the Soviet Union and America. A man name James Chadwick discovered the neutron. Uranium and Plutonium are similar because they are both used for nuclear weapons. Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford helped classify shrapnel using the Greek alphabet., alpha, beta, or gamma decay. Kean talks about the Monte Carlo method and how Ulam and Neumann created it. The difference between a uranium bomb and a cobalt bomb, is that a cobalt bomb will leave the area that it destroyed covered in radiation that kills millions of people and causes mutations.

Reflection:

I enjoyed this chapter. I feel like this chapter was more of a continuation of chapter 5. Mainly because it continued to touch upon the subject of warfare by use of elements. I found it very fascinating to now that atoms splitting was what causes a chain chemical reaction.