Faster than Light
Physicists at CERN believe they’ve measured neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. Since most of modern physics is based on the speed of light being the upper speed limit for practically...
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Sub-atomic Physics: The Significance of 0.8%
When it comes to particle physics … [m]easuring something once is meaningless because of the high degree of uncertainty involved in such exotic, small systems. Scientists rely on taking measurements...
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Sub-atomic particles
A proton is made of three quarks. Image by Arpad Horvath via Wikipedia. LiveScience has a neat little slideshow that briefly describes the different types of elementary particles. These include the...
View ArticleElectron Shells
Brian Cox explains (on the BBC) explains how electron shells are like standing waves, and how that relates to the sizes of atoms, and explains why atoms are mostly space. Citing this post: Urbano, L.,...
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Emission Spectra: How Atoms Emit and Absorb Light
Emission and absorption spectrum of Hydrogen. Image adapted from the one by Wikimedia Commons User:Adrignola. When a photon of light hits an atom three things can happen: it can bounce off; it can pass...
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Flame Tests
Copper burns green. Elements can be identified from the color of light they give off when they’re ionized: their emission spectra. Ms. Wilson’s chemistry class today set fire to some metal salts to...
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Drawing Atoms
This year, I’ve been basing my introduction to basic chemistry for my middle school students around the periodic table of the elements. The first step, however, is to teach them how to draw basic...
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Electron Configurations on the Periodic Table
Having demonstrated how to draw a few simple atoms, I had students fill out a periodic table template with drawings of the first twenty atoms. Actually, I only had them draw the electrons in their...
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An Introduction to Ionic Bonding
Now that we’ve learned how to draw individual atoms (and have an online reference for the first 20 elements), let’s consider ionic bonding. The key thing to remember is that atoms all “want” to have...
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New Particles
Physicists in Europe Find Tantalizing Hints of a Mysterious New Particle: This new particle, if confirmed to exist (the data is not conclusive) seems to go beyond the Standard Model of physics that we...
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What is Dark Matter?
Adam Hadhazy, in Discover Magazine, summarizes the top candidates to explain dark matter and the experiments in progress to find them. These include, WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles,...
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