Orion Sommer
Mrs. Weatherington
Sophomores--3
September, 2015
I-Search
I-Search Plasma
A couple of weeks ago, a YouTube channel called "TheGameTheorists" uploaded a video about how the people in Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z harness their Ki and shoot lasers with it. Ever since I watched that video I 've been interested in learning more about plasma. The video is mainly about how these people use plasma to their advantage. He talks about how schools never teach us about plasma, how it 's the fourth state of matter, and how 99% of the universe is plasma.
I want to learn how plasma is used on earth, why they don’t teach about plasma in school and the benefit of plasma in the universe. Plasma, the state of matter, is the most common form of …show more content…
She said she knows some things, but not enough to let me interview her. She then told me that she would talk to some physics teachers and let me know if she finds somebody. She led me to Mr. Boll, who attended the University of Wisconsin and received his bachelors, and masters degree in chemistry, and has been teaching at Niles West for nine years. The first question I asked was, “how does a gas go from being a gas to a plasma?” The answer he gave me was not as direct as I would have liked it to be but it sufficed. He told me that when an element is in its plasma state the atoms are moving so fast that they knock electrons off of other atoms, and into new ones. I then asked what is the difference between blood plasma and the state of matter plasma is. He told me that in different fields of science, there are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. Plasma in blood is not hot enough and doesn’t have enough energy to be the same as the state of matter plasma. Blood plasma also has a nucleus that contains DNA. I proceeded to ask if there were any elements that couldn’t become a plasma or was hard to make into a plasma. The easiest elements to turn into a plasma are the gaseous ones, all of the rest of them are hard to make a plasma. My next question was, “are there any elements that can be found naturally as a plasma?” The flame of a fire …show more content…
After hearing about it from Mr. Boll, I decided to do some research on it. Bose-Einstein Condensate, or BEC for short, is named after Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nathan Bose who predicted this state of matter existed in 1925, but were not able to prove it’s existence. Seventy years later, two scientists named Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, from the University of Colorado, created the first BEC. They used two-thousand rubidium-87 atoms to make it, and laser cooling and magnetic evaporative cooling to cool it. Four months later, Wolfgang Ketterle condensed sodium-27 atoms at MIT. “Bose–Einstein condensates are extremely fragile. The slightest interaction with the external environment can be enough to warm them past the condensation threshold, eliminating their interesting properties and forming a normal gas” (Wikipedia). The temperature of the BEC made by Cornell and Wieman was just a few billionths of degrees above absolute zero, which is extremely cold. Absolute zero is a theoretical value of the coldest thing in existence; it is zero degrees kelvin, -273.15 degrees celsius, and -459.67 degrees fahrenheit. Because the temperature is so close to absolute zero the atoms in the sample lose all of their energy and start to clump. “The result of this clumping is the BEC. The group of rubidium atoms sits in the same place, creating a ‘super atom.’ There are no longer thousands
Mrs. Weatherington
Sophomores--3
September, 2015
I-Search
I-Search Plasma
A couple of weeks ago, a YouTube channel called "TheGameTheorists" uploaded a video about how the people in Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z harness their Ki and shoot lasers with it. Ever since I watched that video I 've been interested in learning more about plasma. The video is mainly about how these people use plasma to their advantage. He talks about how schools never teach us about plasma, how it 's the fourth state of matter, and how 99% of the universe is plasma.
I want to learn how plasma is used on earth, why they don’t teach about plasma in school and the benefit of plasma in the universe. Plasma, the state of matter, is the most common form of …show more content…
She said she knows some things, but not enough to let me interview her. She then told me that she would talk to some physics teachers and let me know if she finds somebody. She led me to Mr. Boll, who attended the University of Wisconsin and received his bachelors, and masters degree in chemistry, and has been teaching at Niles West for nine years. The first question I asked was, “how does a gas go from being a gas to a plasma?” The answer he gave me was not as direct as I would have liked it to be but it sufficed. He told me that when an element is in its plasma state the atoms are moving so fast that they knock electrons off of other atoms, and into new ones. I then asked what is the difference between blood plasma and the state of matter plasma is. He told me that in different fields of science, there are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. Plasma in blood is not hot enough and doesn’t have enough energy to be the same as the state of matter plasma. Blood plasma also has a nucleus that contains DNA. I proceeded to ask if there were any elements that couldn’t become a plasma or was hard to make into a plasma. The easiest elements to turn into a plasma are the gaseous ones, all of the rest of them are hard to make a plasma. My next question was, “are there any elements that can be found naturally as a plasma?” The flame of a fire …show more content…
After hearing about it from Mr. Boll, I decided to do some research on it. Bose-Einstein Condensate, or BEC for short, is named after Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nathan Bose who predicted this state of matter existed in 1925, but were not able to prove it’s existence. Seventy years later, two scientists named Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, from the University of Colorado, created the first BEC. They used two-thousand rubidium-87 atoms to make it, and laser cooling and magnetic evaporative cooling to cool it. Four months later, Wolfgang Ketterle condensed sodium-27 atoms at MIT. “Bose–Einstein condensates are extremely fragile. The slightest interaction with the external environment can be enough to warm them past the condensation threshold, eliminating their interesting properties and forming a normal gas” (Wikipedia). The temperature of the BEC made by Cornell and Wieman was just a few billionths of degrees above absolute zero, which is extremely cold. Absolute zero is a theoretical value of the coldest thing in existence; it is zero degrees kelvin, -273.15 degrees celsius, and -459.67 degrees fahrenheit. Because the temperature is so close to absolute zero the atoms in the sample lose all of their energy and start to clump. “The result of this clumping is the BEC. The group of rubidium atoms sits in the same place, creating a ‘super atom.’ There are no longer thousands