Learning Nuclear Science with Marbles

Constan, Zach

doi:doi:10.1119/1.3293660

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The Physics Teacher -- February 2010 -- Volume 48, Issue 2, pp. 114

Learning Nuclear Science with Marbles

Zach Constan

National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

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Abstract

References (4)

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Nuclei are small: if an atom was the size of a football field, the nucleus would be an apple sitting on the 50‐yd line. At the same time, nuclei are dense: the Earth, compressed to nuclear density, could fit inside four Sears Towers. The subatomic level is strange and exotic. For that reason, it's not hard to get young minds excited about nuclear science. But how does one move beyond analogies like those above and offer a better understanding of the extraordinary world of the nucleus? This is the challenge faced by the outreach program at Michigan State University's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), a National Science Foundation‐supported facility specializing in the creation and study of rare isotopes. It was necessary to devise a model of the nucleus that students could interact with and even use to approximate the nuclear reactions that create exotic nuclei. The solution was to use magnetic marbles.

KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

physics education, educational aids, nuclear physics, atoms, nuclear density, model-based reasoning, classification, Web sites

PACS

01.40.Fk

Research in physics education
01.40.Ha

Learning theory and science teaching

History

Online Jan 2010

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

0031-921X (print)

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$abstract.society.value is a Member of CrossRef

American Association of Physics Teachers

ARTICLE DATA

Digital Object Identifier

http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.3293660

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“The ABC's of nuclear science,” Phys. Teach. 40, 190 (March 2002); http://www.lbl.gov/abc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay lists many types of decay beyond alpha, beta, and gamma, and provides more background.
D. A. Ostlie and B. W. Carroll, An Introduction to Modern Stellar Astrophysics (Addison-Wesley, San Francisco, 2007).
http://www.nscl.msu.edu/science/nuclearscience describes how the fragmentation process leads to an excited (hot) nucleus from which particles can “evaporate.”