Several people commented about the relative speed of alpha particles and neutrons, which sent me off into more research. Pull on Americium, and you pull on the entire subject of nuclear physics. It gets complicated. What I have found so far is that an alpha particle does have a higher velocity than all but the fastest neutrons, but it does slow down very quickly due its' electrical charge. I'm trying to imagine how this is happening, and I think of the way trains used to pick up mail bags from remote stations. They would hang the mail bag on a hook alongside the tracks and when the train came by it would snag the bag and haul it along. The train is the passing alpha particle and the bag of mail is an electron attached to a stationary atom.
Okay, now imagine that the vehicle picking up the mail bag is not a train but a supersonic jet fighter. It snags the bag, but the bag cannot take the stress and the strap snaps and the bag is left sitting at the station. This is more like what is happening with the alpha particle. One little snag is not going to slow that jet down by much, but if it hooks onto a million bags, one right after another, that could slow it down. So maybe that's what's going on with alpha particles. I still want to check some numbers, but I think I'm on the right track.
But thinking about jet aircraft snagging things reminded of the disaster in Italy where a military jet cut the cable to a gondola and 20 people died. I've been on ski lifts and those cables are thick, and made of steel. Aircraft wings are made out of the thinnest aluminum in the world. It seems more likely to me that the cable would have sliced the wing off the plane rather than the other way around. Funny, I didn't see any pictures of the aircraft at the time, and I didn't find any now when I just went looking. You don't suppose the aircraft story was a cover for something else going on?
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2 comments:
From the NY Times account of the accident:
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/18/world/death-in-the-alps-a-special-report-how-wayward-us-pilot-killed-20-on-ski-lift.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Aviation mechanics said the jet was seriously damaged in four places.
On the front edge of the right wing, which had evidently sliced through the cables, were two gashes several feet apart, each about six inches deep. Electronic equipment under the wing was sheared off. And serious damage was evident on the tail, caused, investigators believe, when the heavier of the two cables snapped across the tail like a whip.
Bad analogy, that mailbag.
I gave you the correct anlogy in the previous post's comments. The cross-section of the ting you're hitting.
Stu
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