[TheBreadBachs]

This is one of my favorite shows but i do get a we bit lost in the shuffle of things. I am a begining student to chemistry. I am a mechanical engineering major so i have only had the chemistry that is required for me.

Here is my question. In the show it talks about Liza Mitner and her friend Hans ( i think) and how they would shoot nutrons into uranium to try and make it bigger. But they obserbed that it was actually doing something else.

How could they SEE what was going on? If atoms are so small, how could they possibly tell what was happening to it??? Also, how do you shoot nutrons into it? Nutrons from what and how?

Thanks

[Borek]

You use a source of neutrons - one that is known to emit them, and you put it close to the irradiated sample.

Then you do teh analysis of teh sample. While you can't "see" single atoms, you can see composition of the sample has changed.

[TheBreadBachs]

hmm, ok so we can see that it has changed, but how do they determine what HAS changed? thanks. this is all very interesting to me

[Borek]

hmm, ok so we can see that it has changed, but how do they determine what HAS changed?

Typically that's where logic and deduction enter the scene.

This is not directly related to the original question, but I suggest you read Ken Croswell's The Alchemy of the Heavens - if I remember correctly he pretty nicely shows how the observational data can be analyzed and used to deduce properties of observed things. While astronomy and chemistry are not the same thing, scientific methods used to find answers are universal.