Bananas are radioactive due to potassium 40 which is one very special isotope. It is both a beta emitter, and (very rarely) a positron emitter. When you observed the strange phenomenon around the banana I got giddy with excitement because I thought you might have been so absurdly lucky and observed positron annihilation. Now this is almost certainly not the case, probably just an artifact of dust or something. but I can have my fantasies!
This is hands down the coolest thing i've seen this week. Thanks for creating all these awsome projects Btw you introduced me to drones and 3D printers and since then i went down a rabbit hole and well i now have both and love these hobbys, just thanks!
I had to watch the clip 4 or 5 times to actually catch what happened. I think the transition is almost too clean because I genuinely did not see it the first few times.
First of all, cool project. One modification I would suggest is to have a magnetic field perpendicular to the surface. Since electrons are negatively charged their tracks would turn clockwise around the magnetic field lines, while alpha particles are positively charged so they would turn counter clockwise. That would be a nice way for you to more easily distinguish between the two particle types. You could perhaps buy neodymium magnets and place between the coolers, just make sure they are pointing in the same direction. I'm not sure where in Sweden you guys are, but in some regions there are naturally occurring radon gas which is radioactive so if you have the cloud chamber in a poorly ventilated basement you might see more activity than if you are in a better ventilated room. You could also test the soil since there might be some trace radioactive isotopes in it from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Alternatively test the meat of wild boars, since they like to dig in the ground and eat roots they might be radioactive with isotopes from Chernobyl. After all, it was the Swedish nuclear power plant Forsmark that where first outside the Soviet union to detect the disaster due to the wind blowing from the south east on that faithful day in 1986. Furthermore, there are regions in Sweden with uranium in the ground, so you could consider testing some rocks (I know that there are some uranium ore in Slotsskogen in Gothenburg), however that might be considered illegal mining of uranium so check the laws first. In conclusion you guys have many interesting things you could test with you cloud chamber.
Tbh I would watch hours of content that is just gazing at radiation with this setup and you explaining the different ocurrences. It was so incredibly interesting and relaxing to watch this, great content!
A lot of old wrist watches have tritium on their dial. Tritium is a slightly radioactive material that was used to make the markers glow in the dark. You can find these watches on ebay, some of them are very cheap.
You can also just buy radioactive samples on eBay or Amazon. It’d be way more radioactive than the small amount of material in a wristwatch, and it isn’t even very expensive.
If you have any local university or college nearby, you can talk to professor to show the setup to their students in exchange of some kind of lab samples of certain isotopes to make a video with. Back in the Uni I used to study we had access to those things as physics students, but we never saw this kind of chamber irl.
I used to work in a teaching lab, I always looked forward to the part in the academic year when we got the cloud chambers out. We used CO2 'snow' to achieve the very cold temperatures (it was my job to make it, by jetting CO2 from a big cylinder into a cloth bag!). Seeing actual particle trails was always a wow moment, never got tired of seeing it. The little chambers we used had a built in radioactive source for alpha and beta.
You can buy old photo lenses and put it inside. Some of them contain radioactive glass elements and they cost next to nothing if bought as "parts only". List of these lenses can be found easliy
I have made a TEC cloud chamber in the past and here is something i learnt, if you add an electric field it makes the particle tracks much more defined, around 2-5Kv does the trick. I would recommend buying a bug zapper tennis racket, removing the internal PCB and connecting the negative high voltage terminal to the cold plate and then add a wire mesh above the cold plate that the positive terminal connects to, in mine it was around 100mm above, yours may vary. if you have this on a switch you can turn it on and off and compare the results. another thing that i found was good was to add a few layers of fabric (I used cotton felt) on top of the wire mesh and soak it in isopropyl alcohol, this will last for a long time so you don't have to keep on spraying, you can add a heating element inside of this but i didn't find that necessary. also the Americium found in smoke alarms is a good source of beta radiation if you are carful and want to try it. Another source of radiation is welding rods i don't remember exactly which type
One super easy and cheap way to get something radioactive in Sweden is to go to a second hand store like Erikshjälpen or Myrorna and go to the glassware section. There’s usually some uranium glass there, which is how I started my collection of it. They’re not marked as such though so you have to use a UV flashlight on them to tell if they’re actually uranium, they have a certain glow.
Try with TIG Welding Tungsten Electrode 2% Thoriated aka red tip, the thorium is supposed to be radioactive and emits alpha particles. They're not very expensive and you can find them in any welding supplies shop.
Definitely this. Also thoriated tungsten electrodes are relatively safe to handle since they're not radioactive enough to pierce through human skin. They're bad when you grind them and release radioactive dust into the air that you can breathe in.
I love this, to be able to see the beauty of something humans was not designed to see, only being able to see it in our imagination, but to actually see it physically it’s absolutely crazy.
We made these many years ago at college, and used a large syringe to draw a partial vacuum, this increased the saturation and made a lot more trails visible - you could probably do that by making your chamber a much lower volume and putting a good seal around the base (might need to use glass instead of perspex?), we soaked a small pad in alcohol which allowed us to observe for much longer (place it to one side in the chamber) and cooled the base with a cake of solid CO2 - when you pulled the syringe the chamber went from barely working to amazing visibility, when a gentle pull is kept on the syringe it could be observed for many minutes before the vacuum or alcohol were exhausted - It's good to see it work with peltier coolers, we used to throw them in the bin due to their high power consumption and poor performance on higher powered processors.
Put Americium from a smoke detector in there. If you leave it in its canister, it is very safe. Or thorium gas lantern mantles. Or Fiestaware. Or as many others have pointed out, uranium glass.
@@joshuathomas512 Tritium beta decays which would show, but not as dramatically as alpha particles. Americium is an excellent choice since alpha particles will show well in a cloud chamber, and is safer so long as you choose not to eat it.
Nice. There was an article in the Scientific American many years ago that gave instructions on how to build a simple cloud chamber using a champaign bottle.
This is simply amazing. The cloud chamber (which I have seen in person in San Francisco) captured my imagination as a young adult. To see you build one yourself boggles my mind.
For a good radioactive source you can use pure potassium chloride, which is sold in grocery stores as a dietary, sodium-free salt-substitute. One in every ten thousand potassium atoms is radioactive K-40 which decays with mostly beta decay with the electron coming off with 1.3 MeV, so that should give you a nice trace. About 10% of the decays produce a 1.5 MeV gamma. Another common source is uranium glass, also called vaseline glass. You can often find it in antique stores, in the form of vases, bowls, or goblets.. It's the beautiful chartreuse-green glass that glows a bit in UV and it's really beautiful in sunlight owing to its fluorescence. It usually contains a few percent uranium oxide. It's been made for the past 2000 years or so. It's quite safe to handle (but I wouldn't put under my pillow at night) and emits some gammas and a few betas from a mix of long-lived uranium and thorium and short-lived intermediate protactinium isotopes. Finally, you can also remove the Americium foil from a smoke detector/alarm. It contains an alloy of Americium-241. It's a powerful alpha emitter, and you'll easily see a few hundred thousand alphas/second coming off of it. It used to be you could get thorium welding rods, but they are no longer sold because of the radioactive hazard. Ditto for lantern-mantles. They used thorium oxide impregnated cotton. To use them you set them on fire, burning off the cotton substrate and leaving a delicate metal-oxide filligree which glowed brightly with a white light when the gas lantern heated it. Again, there aren't many of them left because it became illegal to manufacture and sell them when the dangers of thorium were better understood.
I did not understand 10% of what you said but you had me hooked to watch the thing over and over. Its great to see your mind at work exploring the potential of things. Great video. Keeps these going. I enjoyed watching and learning. CO from Michigan USA
Go to a local thrift store and look for uranium glassware, Its verry common and you can see it light up under UV light. Its slightly radioactive, nothing to worry about.
ionisation type smoke detectors have americium-241 in them, emitting alpha and gamma. you can also likely get some thoriated welding rods from potentially the same store
Good on you for getting it to work with a single layer of peltiers. It was my experience that a stack of two is needed, a high current peltier cooling the hot side of a lower current peltier, which in turn cools the cold plate. The top layer doesnt contribute all that much heat to the system (with them being driven by considerably lower current than the bottom peltiers) but it greatly enhances the delta-t possible.
I remember a while ago some guys made an X-ray device using a reel to reel setup of 3M magic tape. The device needed to be in a vacuum to work as atmospheric particles stopped the effect, but such a basic device could be mounted in or beside the chamber, and stand back. It was thought to be a low tech way to be able to generate X-ray images in remote areas, but I haven’t heard anything about it recently (I heard about this around 20 years ago).
This is pretty cool! You should put some old drinkware or ceramic dishes near the chamber. Some of the really old stuff contains traces of radioactive elements. Or if a family member has an old wrist watch with glow in the dark clock arms.
Dude your content never gets boring been watching for years, seen you grow up with me. It's insane. I wish do do even a fraction of the cool stuff you do. Love from Colorado
See if you can get some potassium salts. I can't even detect a banana with my Geiger-Müller pancake tube, but a bag of Miracle-Gro will easily set it off if I take it out of the box.
In second hand stores you can often find old fashion smoke alarms with a tiny tiny bit of americium in it. Be safe obviously and store the modified smoke alarm well marked but it really is neat to see it emitting those trails. The tiny speck Amercium is contained and glued firmly inside a small metal can that is surrounded by another meshed metal cap and doesnt need scraping of or other nasty action. Your cloud chamber worked like a charm, it's a work of art. Have you considered applying a magnetic field too?
tritium tubes can be obtained pretty cheap. I would also like to see a test with an old Japanese manual lens with yellow coating(most of them are slightly radioactive)
Great work! I'm impressed how ChatGPT answered to your question. Maybe it was not clear enough, but you need to connect negative high voltage to that tungsten wire to create electron beam.
Honestly, this is absolutely insane suggestion by ChatGPT, and I don't understand why anyone even humoured it for a second. It's a -30 cloud chamber and putting a 1626.85C wire (assuming ~1900k hue) is not going to anything other than ruin the effect. Absolutely insane. And how can you connect a negative DC voltage over a wire? Positive and negative in DC just refer to direction of current. If you swapped the connections on each end, you could call it negative, but it makes no difference.
@@1992jamo I agree, the "negative" voltage comment makes no sense. Voltage is simply relative to your reference. So negative one way is positive another.
I made one of these in a high school science class many years ago. It was a small black cup with a clear lid, with some alcohol and a small chunk of dry ice. I still have a mental video of the particle trails. Very cool!
What a great project! If you put the term "Cloud Chamber" in the title the majority of your audience will know exactly what you're talking about, and it will make your video easier to find in search engine results (for all the kids who want to make their own at home). Anyway, greetings! I hope you're doing well. The Marlin project continues to hold me in its grip, even occasionally making progress.
The thing is, if you want to expand your channel and reach a wider layman audience who dont know what a cloud chamber is, you cant put cloud chamber in the title because only people who already know about cloud chambers will click. Veritasium's videos on clickbait and stuff explained this much better. Although here I would say cloud chamber sounds cooler
@@no-bk4zx idk why you think you can't put cloud chamber in the title "I Built Nobel Prize Machine To See Radioactivity: The Cloud Chamber" There. It's that easy. Infact doing this will probably attract a wider audience besides just the layman. For example students. This video is a much better resource than whatever else they might find on the internet
quick tip: you can ask you local university if they let you bring your cloud chamber to campuss and test some radioactive materials in it. usually the physics/chemistry faculties have radioactive samples . I tried it when I build a cloud chamber as a research project and managed to test different radioactive materials on mine, it was actually crazy the amount of radiation you could see.
I love all of your videos. They are detailed without being boring. They tell the story of your process well, and your transitions and editing are entertaining. Keep up the good work.
I used to look up any video I could on cloud chambers so I suppose that's why youtube recommended me this, and I'm glad it did! I look forward to seeing what else you might do with this.
Sugestions of radiactive things: -Old glass plates had uraniun (before 1930, you can test it by using UV light in the dark) -Old smoke detectors had Americium 241 -In Europe you can find Thorite minerals, that have thorium 232 -WT-20 "red tip" welding rods have thorium and some others radioactive elements -Old glow in the dark watches had radium and tritium -You can still buy tritium gunsights today -Really old fire exit signs had radium -You might contact some dental X-ray clinic to let you do a one shot with their equipment
I love the effect! If you tweak the voltage of the TECs a bit, you might reach a better input-power-to-deltaT point as the input power and maximum deltaT depend a lot on your setup (cooling, and thermal conductivity of the aluminum plate). Sometimes you have to reduce the power to the TECs to increase the deltaT. Sounds counter-intuitive, but that did the trick for my setup.
you should make a website to link with the full details of your builds! ElectroBoom does this and its amazing for getting more information on how and why he builds a device a certain way
For the radioaktive things, sometimes old watches have radium color used in it or you can look for vintage lenses with thorium used in the glass (although they can get pretty expensive)
I work in NDT-company and we use ray tube to do non destructive testing on things. I always wondered how the radioactive rays look like. Very interesting video.
just started watching you and I'm already a big fan, I love your editing, and the amount of skill you show off in this video alone. keep up the good work man
My son and I built a cloud chamber, not this complex, but our reaction to seeing the first trails was the same as yours. It was amazing to see it with our own eyes.
bout time someone finally started doing videos on cloud chambers. there are a few from cloudylabs but it needs more exposure. Please put a waterproof phone in one! i've always wanted to see the sort of particles they release
Instead of putting many peltier elements next to each other, you can stack them on top of each other. This decreases their efficiency even further, but the temperature differential gets bigger. So it will take longer to cool but you can hit lower temperatures more easily.
You do good work, that's really excellent. A fun thing to try in there would be an old watch with a luminous dial and hands from a junk store. If you get an old enough one you have a radium source, still radioactive even if the fluorescent material mixed into the paint has stopped working. It's a real problem for people who repair old watches, the paint flakes off and can be inhaled.
All this complexity and power hungry equipment kind of dashes my hopes of building my own cloud chamber. But, good job! It's awesome to see it working.
I work for a company back in the early 90s building those thermal couplers from the ingots that are inside cutting those out of bars of stock into little cubes and soldering onto the ceramic board.🤔😎 every aspect of it and to this day those things blow my mind, all you have to do is change the polarity and it'll get hot or cold really weird but it works. It's because of the Special Metals that are in the little blocks they caused this reaction. it's weird, alien technology LOL👽
You can buy a cloud chamber from educational scientific supply houses for about $20, and a trip to the ice cream shop for some dry ice is all you need for cooling. Methanol is the standard alcohol used in cloud chambers. Also, orange Fiesta Ware ceramic plates are colored with uranium oxide, as are the lenses in yellow traffic lights, so they make a handy radiation source.
Idk if you can have it shipped to your country but here in the states we have super old uranium glass. You may be able to find it at yard sales, garage sales, antique stores, flea markets, or swap meets. In regular light it can be between a canary yellow and an emerald green and is 100% radioactive you're not supposed to eat off of them.
I built a cloud chamber for a high school physics class. I cooled it using a block of dry ice and used a steam iron for the heating element. The alcohol vapor was finer then in your setup so the vapor trails were finer also.
Dry ice is simple, co2 fire extinguisher, wearing protective clothing, and using a silicone rubber sheet, you put the bell of the co2 extinguisher pressing down hard onto the silicone sheet and pull the trigger. the over pressure forms dry ice. Make sure there is no one below the layer of dry ice,
That was so cool honestly! I just learned about cloud chambers from seeing one at the Griffith Observatory in LA! I’m going to try and build one soon but just use dry ice under a copper plate due to its higher conductivity and perhaps use a reptile heating mat of the ceiling of the chamber to evaporate the alcohol. Thank you again😊!
Awesome project !!! Congrats ! I wanted to suggest that you could also make a longer time lapse video just with the particle tracks that you observed - I would definetly watch that. The same way you have these long videos of a fireplace burning, maybe this could be a more interesting version of that.. Oh and one more thing - you could also put one or several Geiger counters on each side of the box to have some kind of correlation with what you see in the chamber you built. Or maybe one is enough? I'm not sure. In any case, Awesome !!! Keep doing cool stuff !
Super clever with the 3D printer bed! I've wanted to build one of these for so long but never saw a design I liked. I tried a few of the dry ice ones and even went to a museum to go see one. The one at the museum was out of order and my dry ice one was meh. TL;DR this is a fantastic build and has me inspired to make my own, thanks dude!
-30 degrees is pretty easy for a refrigerant for example r410a. So you'll need a couple copper pipes(like 12mm and 2mm), a compressor with a radiator for fridges, torch lighter, soldering paste and solder wire. So you'll take about 2.5 m of 2mm copper pipe, solder it to the high pressure compressor output on the radiator (you can bend it to spiral for saving space) the other end should be inserted into 12mm pipe and soldered to it(you can use a hummer for squishing the end of 12mm pipe to fit 2mm pipe into it like 10-20mm deep). So the 12 mm pipe would be at least -40 degrees Celsius and you can bend it into something like a zig zag pattern under the table to cool it down and then it goes to the input of the compressor. And finally solder all the connections. As for the refrigerant you can go to the local refrigerator or AC repair shop and ask to fill it up with the refrigerant. For such a small thing I think there'll be more than enough 200g of the refrigerant
What I really liked about this video was how, when you get the papers and other materials to demonstrate the particles passing where ever there want, and the banana creating odd patterns, I think you have on your hands here a unique opportunity to create a type of art no ones seen before. imagine if you had different colored light to make a light show of it. imagine if different colored light affected, the outcomes of the particles. oh man. Vacuum Alcohol Laser Light Show? sign me up!
The chamber that was at my local science shop was broken the last time I went. I was sad because that is the coolest thing that stuck in my mind as a kid the first time I saw it.
When I was 14 or 15, I built one and observed the particles in my bedroom closet, I'm 74 now and still keep up on physics. Sabine Hossenfelder, would be a good follow for any young person interested in physics.
Fan va coolt du! Fortsätt med vad du gör. Blev chockad när du börja prata svenska vilket gjorde mig ännu mer intresserad och fick mig att faktist att lära nått nytt
You can definitely buy samples of uranium glass. Even now, you can easily buy Czech beads made of uranium glass. One bead is enough to see everything. Also on Aliexpress, glass medallions containing thorium are sold. They are called "scalar energy medallion". It looks like a circle of greenish glass in a metal ring. You don't need to wear these medallions if you don't want to end up with radiation damage. And, of course, you can grow a big beautiful potassium chloride crystal and put it in your cell!
what about putting old pottery in them the ones that used radon/uranium for the glaze you could probaly order a non broken cup of it(which doesnt leak radiation) then break it and put it in the chamber
I built a tiny version of this - I mean it had a cascade but was only the size of the Peltier Square - but I got it to work numerous times - would like a bigger one - I admire all the construction steps and work you put into it to get it working 👍👍🙏🙏
Get some thermal paste/liquid metal for better heat transfer to the plate! Also, Radium was used in a lot of old things (like clocks) to make them glow in the dark, you may find some in thrift stores and second-hand markets.
Using a polarizing filter on your camera helps to show more of the faint condensation trails. It must be used the opposite way though. Not hiding reflections, but emphasizing them.
You can find some radioactive material inside a smoke detector. Most household detectors contain a very small amount of americium-241, a radioactive isotope. It would be nice to see how it works with a radioactive element.
For the cloud chamber: Rocks, particularly ones that fluoresce under ultraviolet light. They should be cheap in Sweden. For Simon: Cool project! A little spray insulation between those TECs might not hurt.
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Don't smoke alarms have a radioactive element in them? You might be able to find uranium glass as well.
Or Fiestaware or thorium gas lantern mantles. Or maybe radium dials, but those are significantly more dangerous than the other three I'm pretty sure.
Yes, smoke detectors have americium inside them which is radioactive.
There should be radioactiv photo lenses too, but be carful, keep some distance to your body and get rid of them afterwards.
Also welding electrodes
@@DaimyoD0 I Have Them Lantern Wicks, I Could Send SOmeone A Piece If Anyone Wants
Bananas are radioactive due to potassium 40 which is one very special isotope. It is both a beta emitter, and (very rarely) a positron emitter. When you observed the strange phenomenon around the banana I got giddy with excitement because I thought you might have been so absurdly lucky and observed positron annihilation. Now this is almost certainly not the case, probably just an artifact of dust or something. but I can have my fantasies!
you have some sick fantasies! 😄
This was super interesting and now I want to see a positron annihilation around a banana
I was today years old when i learned potassium 40 is slightly radioactive.
Wtf.
You still need tonnes of bananas to make a considerable amounts of visible radiation in a cloud chamber.
I just got excited with you. You are the best kind of nerd, and I like that.
This is hands down the coolest thing i've seen this week. Thanks for creating all these awsome projects
Btw you introduced me to drones and 3D printers and since then i went down a rabbit hole and well i now have both and love these hobbys, just thanks!
Same, i knew nothing about 3d printing or rc vehicles, now I have 2 fpv drones and two 3d printers:)
SAME i got a 3D printer to support my drone habit... now 3d modeling
"the coolest thing I've seen this week" agreed 🥶
it do be very low in temperature
🤣🤣😂😂
Dude.. that transition @0:57 was a work of art on its own 👌🏼👌🏼
I was searching the comments for this. It was really cool. The viewers didn't notice it I guess.
I had to watch the clip 4 or 5 times to actually catch what happened. I think the transition is almost too clean because I genuinely did not see it the first few times.
haha exactly what I was about to say!!
Black Magic!
Dude's on another level
First of all, cool project. One modification I would suggest is to have a magnetic field perpendicular to the surface. Since electrons are negatively charged their tracks would turn clockwise around the magnetic field lines, while alpha particles are positively charged so they would turn counter clockwise. That would be a nice way for you to more easily distinguish between the two particle types. You could perhaps buy neodymium magnets and place between the coolers, just make sure they are pointing in the same direction.
I'm not sure where in Sweden you guys are, but in some regions there are naturally occurring radon gas which is radioactive so if you have the cloud chamber in a poorly ventilated basement you might see more activity than if you are in a better ventilated room. You could also test the soil since there might be some trace radioactive isotopes in it from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Alternatively test the meat of wild boars, since they like to dig in the ground and eat roots they might be radioactive with isotopes from Chernobyl. After all, it was the Swedish nuclear power plant Forsmark that where first outside the Soviet union to detect the disaster due to the wind blowing from the south east on that faithful day in 1986. Furthermore, there are regions in Sweden with uranium in the ground, so you could consider testing some rocks (I know that there are some uranium ore in Slotsskogen in Gothenburg), however that might be considered illegal mining of uranium so check the laws first.
In conclusion you guys have many interesting things you could test with you cloud chamber.
This, a magnetic field would make this so much better!
Magnetic fields would be awesome!
👆🤓
@@WhosThisPersonNotMe "👆🤓" - 🤓
@@fahad_hassan_92" "👆🤓" - 🤓 " - 🤓
Tbh I would watch hours of content that is just gazing at radiation with this setup and you explaining the different ocurrences. It was so incredibly interesting and relaxing to watch this, great content!
Saw the cloud chamber elsewhere and currently on a looking at most of those video ahah
A lot of old wrist watches have tritium on their dial. Tritium is a slightly radioactive material that was used to make the markers glow in the dark. You can find these watches on ebay, some of them are very cheap.
Tritium is common in fire arm weapon sights & optics as well, as it requires no batteries to glow and lasts for a long time
You can also just buy radioactive samples on eBay or Amazon. It’d be way more radioactive than the small amount of material in a wristwatch, and it isn’t even very expensive.
@@Chevsilverado This. Thorium is super cheap too, and you can also find americium sources in about half of smoke detectors
Downside of Tritium is that it has a very short half life. So going this route may be hit and miss if buying off Ebay.
It's also still used in glowing exit signs
If you have any local university or college nearby, you can talk to professor to show the setup to their students in exchange of some kind of lab samples of certain isotopes to make a video with.
Back in the Uni I used to study we had access to those things as physics students, but we never saw this kind of chamber irl.
Dude... your editing skills are only getting better. :) Great job.
What was wrong with his eating skills before hand?
@@yongyea4147 he was more of a goofball with the editing before hand. that was more fun seeing simon as a goofball
Great s h i t ! Just a copy of other sh ! t s !
@@yongyea4147 nothing was wrong with with his editing skills before. It's just that his editing skills are getting more and more advanced.
I used to work in a teaching lab, I always looked forward to the part in the academic year when we got the cloud chambers out. We used CO2 'snow' to achieve the very cold temperatures (it was my job to make it, by jetting CO2 from a big cylinder into a cloth bag!). Seeing actual particle trails was always a wow moment, never got tired of seeing it. The little chambers we used had a built in radioactive source for alpha and beta.
Seeing something (an electron) pass through a piece of paper is just not something I'd ever think I'd see... this is pretty amazing!
Yeah!
You can buy old photo lenses and put it inside. Some of them contain radioactive glass elements and they cost next to nothing if bought as "parts only". List of these lenses can be found easliy
I have made a TEC cloud chamber in the past and here is something i learnt, if you add an electric field it makes the particle tracks much more defined, around 2-5Kv does the trick. I would recommend buying a bug zapper tennis racket, removing the internal PCB and connecting the negative high voltage terminal to the cold plate and then add a wire mesh above the cold plate that the positive terminal connects to, in mine it was around 100mm above, yours may vary. if you have this on a switch you can turn it on and off and compare the results.
another thing that i found was good was to add a few layers of fabric (I used cotton felt) on top of the wire mesh and soak it in isopropyl alcohol, this will last for a long time so you don't have to keep on spraying, you can add a heating element inside of this but i didn't find that necessary.
also the Americium found in smoke alarms is a good source of beta radiation if you are carful and want to try it. Another source of radiation is welding rods i don't remember exactly which type
6011 welding rods contain a high-cellulose potassium type coating which could give off a slight amount of radiation.
One super easy and cheap way to get something radioactive in Sweden is to go to a second hand store like Erikshjälpen or Myrorna and go to the glassware section. There’s usually some uranium glass there, which is how I started my collection of it. They’re not marked as such though so you have to use a UV flashlight on them to tell if they’re actually uranium, they have a certain glow.
Try with TIG Welding Tungsten Electrode 2% Thoriated aka red tip, the thorium is supposed to be radioactive and emits alpha particles. They're not very expensive and you can find them in any welding supplies shop.
Definitely this. Also thoriated tungsten electrodes are relatively safe to handle since they're not radioactive enough to pierce through human skin. They're bad when you grind them and release radioactive dust into the air that you can breathe in.
Also gas lamp hoods are thoriated too.
Not only is the content awesome, but the editing is top notch too! Those transitions are super slick, well done
Love catching this guys builds.
So innovative compared to so many of the others.
Wish I had his level of intelligence regarding electronics.
Study and you will get that knowledge.
I love this, to be able to see the beauty of something humans was not designed to see, only being able to see it in our imagination, but to actually see it physically it’s absolutely crazy.
And asking AI to help him see it lol.
And me thinking TH-cam was already a clout chamber
You should go look at tik tok lol
Lol ZING!!!!!
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We made these many years ago at college, and used a large syringe to draw a partial vacuum, this increased the saturation and made a lot more trails visible - you could probably do that by making your chamber a much lower volume and putting a good seal around the base (might need to use glass instead of perspex?), we soaked a small pad in alcohol which allowed us to observe for much longer (place it to one side in the chamber) and cooled the base with a cake of solid CO2 - when you pulled the syringe the chamber went from barely working to amazing visibility, when a gentle pull is kept on the syringe it could be observed for many minutes before the vacuum or alcohol were exhausted - It's good to see it work with peltier coolers, we used to throw them in the bin due to their high power consumption and poor performance on higher powered processors.
Put Americium from a smoke detector in there. If you leave it in its canister, it is very safe.
Or thorium gas lantern mantles. Or Fiestaware.
Or as many others have pointed out, uranium glass.
Uranium glass is the safest of the non-smoke detector options. This mainly comes down to that the others are more likely to chip/fleck
Perhaps he could easily obtain Thorium from a microwave magnetron.
why not put a raw uranium deposit ;)
Or Tritium which was used on older watches as lume on hour markers and hands
@@joshuathomas512 Tritium beta decays which would show, but not as dramatically as alpha particles. Americium is an excellent choice since alpha particles will show well in a cloud chamber, and is safer so long as you choose not to eat it.
Nice. There was an article in the Scientific American many years ago that gave instructions on how to build a simple cloud chamber using a champaign bottle.
This is hands down the coolest thing you've built, and that's saying something because there's a lot of contenders
This is simply amazing. The cloud chamber (which I have seen in person in San Francisco) captured my imagination as a young adult. To see you build one yourself boggles my mind.
I remember using a cloud chamber at school, but we just used dry ice - but yours is a more hi-tech solution :)
For a good radioactive source you can use pure potassium chloride, which is sold in grocery stores as a dietary, sodium-free salt-substitute. One in every ten thousand potassium atoms is radioactive K-40 which decays with mostly beta decay with the electron coming off with 1.3 MeV, so that should give you a nice trace. About 10% of the decays produce a 1.5 MeV gamma. Another common source is uranium glass, also called vaseline glass. You can often find it in antique stores, in the form of vases, bowls, or goblets.. It's the beautiful chartreuse-green glass that glows a bit in UV and it's really beautiful in sunlight owing to its fluorescence. It usually contains a few percent uranium oxide. It's been made for the past 2000 years or so. It's quite safe to handle (but I wouldn't put under my pillow at night) and emits some gammas and a few betas from a mix of long-lived uranium and thorium and short-lived intermediate protactinium isotopes. Finally, you can also remove the Americium foil from a smoke detector/alarm. It contains an alloy of Americium-241. It's a powerful alpha emitter, and you'll easily see a few hundred thousand alphas/second coming off of it. It used to be you could get thorium welding rods, but they are no longer sold because of the radioactive hazard. Ditto for lantern-mantles. They used thorium oxide impregnated cotton. To use them you set them on fire, burning off the cotton substrate and leaving a delicate metal-oxide filligree which glowed brightly with a white light when the gas lantern heated it. Again, there aren't many of them left because it became illegal to manufacture and sell them when the dangers of thorium were better understood.
I love that you present your experiments in 4K Simon. Keep it up 👍.
I did not understand 10% of what you said but you had me hooked to watch the thing over and over. Its great to see your mind at work exploring the potential of things. Great video. Keeps these going. I enjoyed watching and learning. CO from Michigan USA
Go to a local thrift store and look for uranium glassware, Its verry common and you can see it light up under UV light. Its slightly radioactive, nothing to worry about.
ionisation type smoke detectors have americium-241 in them, emitting alpha and gamma. you can also likely get some thoriated welding rods from potentially the same store
I love how you do transitions to skip things like painting. And this was a genuinely interesting topic. Great video!
You could try to find an old radium-paint watch/clock from before 1960 (when radium paint was banned).
Good on you for getting it to work with a single layer of peltiers. It was my experience that a stack of two is needed, a high current peltier cooling the hot side of a lower current peltier, which in turn cools the cold plate. The top layer doesnt contribute all that much heat to the system (with them being driven by considerably lower current than the bottom peltiers) but it greatly enhances the delta-t possible.
Awesome project!
This is easily one of the coolest videos I've seen in a long time! Definitely want to try it out myself
Coolest. See what you did there 😉 (totally right though).
I remember a while ago some guys made an X-ray device using a reel to reel setup of 3M magic tape. The device needed to be in a vacuum to work as atmospheric particles stopped the effect, but such a basic device could be mounted in or beside the chamber, and stand back. It was thought to be a low tech way to be able to generate X-ray images in remote areas, but I haven’t heard anything about it recently (I heard about this around 20 years ago).
this video should have been so much longer! my god that was beautiful!
You should try placing some uranium or something in there to see if you can identify gamma radiation.
This is pretty cool! You should put some old drinkware or ceramic dishes near the chamber. Some of the really old stuff contains traces of radioactive elements. Or if a family member has an old wrist watch with glow in the dark clock arms.
Dude your content never gets boring been watching for years, seen you grow up with me. It's insane. I wish do do even a fraction of the cool stuff you do. Love from Colorado
This is next level stuff. Best editing, best experiment, best fun. OMG !
Thank you
See if you can get some potassium salts. I can't even detect a banana with my Geiger-Müller pancake tube, but a bag of Miracle-Gro will easily set it off if I take it out of the box.
I remember making one in Boy Scouts - it was such a cool experience. Thanks for the video - brings back some memories.
In second hand stores you can often find old fashion smoke alarms with a tiny tiny bit of americium in it. Be safe obviously and store the modified smoke alarm well marked but it really is neat to see it emitting those trails. The tiny speck Amercium is contained and glued firmly inside a small metal can that is surrounded by another meshed metal cap and doesnt need scraping of or other nasty action.
Your cloud chamber worked like a charm, it's a work of art.
Have you considered applying a magnetic field too?
Maybe a smoke detector in the chamber? More specifically the radioactive parts inside
modern sensors do not use isotopes
@@artineogda what do they use instead? my old sensor has a radioactive warning on it
@@jungletroll3844 they use optoelectronics. Modern optoelectronic sensors can be very sensitive.
@@artineogda ty
tritium tubes can be obtained pretty cheap. I would also like to see a test with an old Japanese manual lens with yellow coating(most of them are slightly radioactive)
Great work! I'm impressed how ChatGPT answered to your question. Maybe it was not clear enough, but you need to connect negative high voltage to that tungsten wire to create electron beam.
Honestly, this is absolutely insane suggestion by ChatGPT, and I don't understand why anyone even humoured it for a second. It's a -30 cloud chamber and putting a 1626.85C wire (assuming ~1900k hue) is not going to anything other than ruin the effect. Absolutely insane.
And how can you connect a negative DC voltage over a wire? Positive and negative in DC just refer to direction of current. If you swapped the connections on each end, you could call it negative, but it makes no difference.
@@1992jamo I agree, the "negative" voltage comment makes no sense. Voltage is simply relative to your reference. So negative one way is positive another.
I made one of these in a high school science class many years ago. It was a small black cup with a clear lid, with some alcohol and a small chunk of dry ice. I still have a mental video of the particle trails. Very cool!
What a great project! If you put the term "Cloud Chamber" in the title the majority of your audience will know exactly what you're talking about, and it will make your video easier to find in search engine results (for all the kids who want to make their own at home). Anyway, greetings! I hope you're doing well. The Marlin project continues to hold me in its grip, even occasionally making progress.
The thing is, if you want to expand your channel and reach a wider layman audience who dont know what a cloud chamber is, you cant put cloud chamber in the title because only people who already know about cloud chambers will click. Veritasium's videos on clickbait and stuff explained this much better.
Although here I would say cloud chamber sounds cooler
@@no-bk4zx idk why you think you can't put cloud chamber in the title
"I Built Nobel Prize Machine To See Radioactivity: The Cloud Chamber"
There. It's that easy. Infact doing this will probably attract a wider audience besides just the layman. For example students. This video is a much better resource than whatever else they might find on the internet
but this is youtube and he wants to monetize. he prefers click bait.
tf is a cloud chamber?
i had never in my life heard of a cloud chamber before this video so glad it wasn't pidgeonholed
quick tip: you can ask you local university if they let you bring your cloud chamber to campuss and test some radioactive materials in it. usually the physics/chemistry faculties have radioactive samples . I tried it when I build a cloud chamber as a research project and managed to test different radioactive materials on mine, it was actually crazy the amount of radiation you could see.
I love all of your videos. They are detailed without being boring. They tell the story of your process well, and your transitions and editing are entertaining. Keep up the good work.
I used to look up any video I could on cloud chambers so I suppose that's why youtube recommended me this, and I'm glad it did! I look forward to seeing what else you might do with this.
Can you put in this pellet of metal I found while metal detecting in Australia?
lol perhaps a little IR192 tictac?
Sugestions of radiactive things:
-Old glass plates had uraniun (before 1930, you can test it by using UV light in the dark)
-Old smoke detectors had Americium 241
-In Europe you can find Thorite minerals, that have thorium 232
-WT-20 "red tip" welding rods have thorium and some others radioactive elements
-Old glow in the dark watches had radium and tritium
-You can still buy tritium gunsights today
-Really old fire exit signs had radium
-You might contact some dental X-ray clinic to let you do a one shot with their equipment
I love the effect! If you tweak the voltage of the TECs a bit, you might reach a better input-power-to-deltaT point as the input power and maximum deltaT depend a lot on your setup (cooling, and thermal conductivity of the aluminum plate). Sometimes you have to reduce the power to the TECs to increase the deltaT. Sounds counter-intuitive, but that did the trick for my setup.
you should make a website to link with the full details of your builds! ElectroBoom does this and its amazing for getting more information on how and why he builds a device a certain way
For the radioaktive things, sometimes old watches have radium color used in it or you can look for vintage lenses with thorium used in the glass (although they can get pretty expensive)
I work in NDT-company and we use ray tube to do non destructive testing on things. I always wondered how the radioactive rays look like. Very interesting video.
just started watching you and I'm already a big fan, I love your editing, and the amount of skill you show off in this video alone. keep up the good work man
Fascinating project! It's nice to see how the canal is constantly growing :) Radioactive substances are installed in fire alarms, it's worth a try.
My son and I built a cloud chamber, not this complex, but our reaction to seeing the first trails was the same as yours. It was amazing to see it with our own eyes.
So much fun to watch! Thanks for the incredible amount of work that went into it.
bout time someone finally started doing videos on cloud chambers. there are a few from cloudylabs but it needs more exposure. Please put a waterproof phone in one! i've always wanted to see the sort of particles they release
Instead of putting many peltier elements next to each other, you can stack them on top of each other. This decreases their efficiency even further, but the temperature differential gets bigger. So it will take longer to cool but you can hit lower temperatures more easily.
You do good work, that's really excellent. A fun thing to try in there would be an old watch with a luminous dial and hands from a junk store. If you get an old enough one you have a radium source, still radioactive even if the fluorescent material mixed into the paint has stopped working. It's a real problem for people who repair old watches, the paint flakes off and can be inhaled.
All this complexity and power hungry equipment kind of dashes my hopes of building my own cloud chamber. But, good job! It's awesome to see it working.
I work for a company back in the early 90s building those thermal couplers from the ingots that are inside cutting those out of bars of stock into little cubes and soldering onto the ceramic board.🤔😎 every aspect of it and to this day those things blow my mind, all you have to do is change the polarity and it'll get hot or cold really weird but it works. It's because of the Special Metals that are in the little blocks they caused this reaction. it's weird, alien technology LOL👽
This is sick. I usually see people make these with dry ice, but it's awesome you don't need that
You can buy a cloud chamber from educational scientific supply houses for about $20, and a trip to the ice cream shop for some dry ice is all you need for cooling. Methanol is the standard alcohol used in cloud chambers. Also, orange Fiesta Ware ceramic plates are colored with uranium oxide, as are the lenses in yellow traffic lights, so they make a handy radiation source.
Idk if you can have it shipped to your country but here in the states we have super old uranium glass. You may be able to find it at yard sales, garage sales, antique stores, flea markets, or swap meets. In regular light it can be between a canary yellow and an emerald green and is 100% radioactive you're not supposed to eat off of them.
I built a cloud chamber for a high school physics class. I cooled it using a block of dry ice and used a steam iron for the heating element. The alcohol vapor was finer then in your setup so the vapor trails were finer also.
Dry ice is simple, co2 fire extinguisher, wearing protective clothing, and using a silicone rubber sheet, you put the bell of the co2 extinguisher pressing down hard onto the silicone sheet and pull the trigger. the over pressure forms dry ice. Make sure there is no one below the layer of dry ice,
For a light source, you should try a laser shot onto a clear rod. It should make a laser sheet, but may be thinner than you’d like.
This is one of the best pieces of content on youtube I have seen in my entire life (30 y.o).
That was so cool honestly! I just learned about cloud chambers from seeing one at the Griffith Observatory in LA!
I’m going to try and build one soon but just use dry ice under a copper plate due to its higher conductivity and perhaps use a reptile heating mat of the ceiling of the chamber to evaporate the alcohol.
Thank you again😊!
Awesome project !!! Congrats !
I wanted to suggest that you could also make a longer time lapse video just with the particle tracks that you observed - I would definetly watch that.
The same way you have these long videos of a fireplace burning, maybe this could be a more interesting version of that..
Oh and one more thing - you could also put one or several Geiger counters on each side of the box to have some kind of correlation with what you see in the chamber you built. Or maybe one is enough? I'm not sure.
In any case, Awesome !!! Keep doing cool stuff !
Super clever with the 3D printer bed! I've wanted to build one of these for so long but never saw a design I liked. I tried a few of the dry ice ones and even went to a museum to go see one. The one at the museum was out of order and my dry ice one was meh. TL;DR this is a fantastic build and has me inspired to make my own, thanks dude!
You know what would be very cool? Having a wallpaper that is a timelapse of the cloud champer active. Great video btw
This is super amazing, can't wait to see what you put into next.
-30 degrees is pretty easy for a refrigerant for example r410a. So you'll need a couple copper pipes(like 12mm and 2mm), a compressor with a radiator for fridges, torch lighter, soldering paste and solder wire. So you'll take about 2.5 m of 2mm copper pipe, solder it to the high pressure compressor output on the radiator (you can bend it to spiral for saving space) the other end should be inserted into 12mm pipe and soldered to it(you can use a hummer for squishing the end of 12mm pipe to fit 2mm pipe into it like 10-20mm deep). So the 12 mm pipe would be at least -40 degrees Celsius and you can bend it into something like a zig zag pattern under the table to cool it down and then it goes to the input of the compressor. And finally solder all the connections. As for the refrigerant you can go to the local refrigerator or AC repair shop and ask to fill it up with the refrigerant. For such a small thing I think there'll be more than enough 200g of the refrigerant
Smoothest transition I've ever seen 0:58
What I really liked about this video was how, when you get the papers and other materials to demonstrate the particles passing where ever there want, and the banana creating odd patterns, I think you have on your hands here a unique opportunity to create a type of art no ones seen before. imagine if you had different colored light to make a light show of it. imagine if different colored light affected, the outcomes of the particles. oh man. Vacuum Alcohol Laser Light Show? sign me up!
Radiation going through different materials is really cool. Haven't seen that before
The chamber that was at my local science shop was broken the last time I went. I was sad because that is the coolest thing that stuck in my mind as a kid the first time I saw it.
When I was 14 or 15, I built one and observed the particles in my bedroom closet, I'm 74 now and still keep up on physics.
Sabine Hossenfelder, would be a good follow for any young person interested in physics.
Fan va coolt du! Fortsätt med vad du gör. Blev chockad när du börja prata svenska vilket gjorde mig ännu mer intresserad och fick mig att faktist att lära nått nytt
That was AMAZING. I can watch this experience a whole day…
You can definitely buy samples of uranium glass. Even now, you can easily buy Czech beads made of uranium glass. One bead is enough to see everything. Also on Aliexpress, glass medallions containing thorium are sold. They are called "scalar energy medallion". It looks like a circle of greenish glass in a metal ring. You don't need to wear these medallions if you don't want to end up with radiation damage. And, of course, you can grow a big beautiful potassium chloride crystal and put it in your cell!
what about putting old pottery in them the ones that used radon/uranium for the glaze
you could probaly order a non broken cup of it(which doesnt leak radiation) then break it and put it in the chamber
I built a tiny version of this - I mean it had a cascade but was only the size of the Peltier Square - but I got it to work numerous times - would like a bigger one - I admire all the construction steps and work you put into it to get it working 👍👍🙏🙏
your transitions are just so smooth god dang
Watching those particle formations is so satisfying
Get some thermal paste/liquid metal for better heat transfer to the plate!
Also, Radium was used in a lot of old things (like clocks) to make them glow in the dark, you may find some in thrift stores and second-hand markets.
You are a legend and a genius to be mad enough to make these things! Awesome! Really enjoyed watching this!
WOW, simply WOW!!
Thank you for sharing your journey of this build
Cloud chamber and rolled ice cream maker in one, nice!
Using a polarizing filter on your camera helps to show more of the faint condensation trails. It must be used the opposite way though. Not hiding reflections, but emphasizing them.
You can find some radioactive material inside a smoke detector. Most household detectors contain a very small amount of americium-241, a radioactive isotope. It would be nice to see how it works with a radioactive element.
I'll have to watch just a few more times so I can understand it. Those trails were really neat looking
For the cloud chamber: Rocks, particularly ones that fluoresce under ultraviolet light. They should be cheap in Sweden.
For Simon: Cool project! A little spray insulation between those TECs might not hurt.