This is how my day started. Not with the more typical student question of “are we going to do anything,” but with a question that carried with it the tacit assumption that of course we would be learning something, and the only question was what it would be. My response? “Thank you for that! It’s only 7:30am and already you’ve made my day!” Followed by a description of my plan for the day.
Whenever I can, I teach by discussion. I throw ideas out. We talk about them. I explain any necessary concepts, and we discuss the implications. I try to start with “what if…?” and I try to ask the questions that I don’t have answers for. A couple of days ago, we found the theoretical endpoint of the periodic table, quite by accident. We were talking about the fundamental forces (the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetic force, and gravity), and I pulled up some information on the web that gave relative strengths of the four. The strong force was arbitrarily set to unity, which resulted a value of about 1/137 for the electromagnetic force. Assuming that the 1/137 is for something that has the charge of a proton or electron, that means that when the number of protons reaches 137, the repulsive force between the positive charges should equal the nuclear force that holds the nucleus together. If this is true, it would mean that it’s impossible to have a nucleus that contains more than 137 protons.
So what did we learn today? We started with the relative amounts of energy released by an atomic bomb vs. TNT, which prompted a discussion of the cold war and what it was like to live in an era when we all believed the end of the world would already have happened by now. From there, we gradually worked our way to the design of a nuclear power plant. Along the way, we covered how a generator works and an A.D.D. moment (my term for a tangent) about the mechanisms of how carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide cause suffocation.
Damn, this is fun!
