Greetings from Illinois

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Michael Hughes
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Mar 24, 2017 4:42 pm
Real name: Michael Hughes

Greetings from Illinois

Post by Michael Hughes »

Hello everyone! I'm currently a masters student at the University of Illinois, studying the modeling of atmospheric aerosols.

Or, at least, that's what I'm supposed to be doing, and I do sometimes actually work on what I'm supposed to work on. But I have a problem, you see: I'm interested in all of science, not to mention history, politics, economics, and so on. I was a physics major as an undergrad, did most of a masters program in biology, and now I'm doing atmospheric science. Luckily I have a fantastic advisor, and the requirements for what constitutes a thesis are pretty lax here, so I will actually probably graduate in August. What to go from there is totally up in the air.

I do a lot of reading, but reading alone isn't enough to really understand science: you have to work with your hands too. I'm a big amateur science hobbyist, especially in the last couple of years. I got interested in chemistry as a follow-on to the atmospheric chemistry that I learned about for my project, and I had actually taken very little chemistry despite the lots of physics and biology. So I went to work educating myself, buying a bunch of chemicals and glassware and doing some interesting reactions, helped along by sciencemadness.org and several great youtubers such as ChemPlayer and NileRed. I learned a whole lot that I wouldn't have gotten in a classroom or just by reading stuff.

But, as it turns out, Big Brother gets really curious about you when you buy lots of chemicals and glassware as a private citizen. He tolerates it for a while, but only for so long. On March 9 I was awoken by a loud knock on the door, and I got to meet a couple of nice FBI agents. They legitimately were nice to me, and they were able to figure out pretty quickly that I was a nerd, not a bomb-maker or drug cook. They talked to my advisor as well, and my story checked out, so as far as I know I won't see them again. But the fire department got called, and they made me get rid of just about all of my interesting chemicals, especially the several liters of flammable solvents that I had in a plastic tub in my apartment. Sadly most organic solvents are flammable, and the ones that aren't tend to be chlorinated and unpleasant (phosgene, HCl, etc) in a fire either.

So I'm changing my mad science around a bit and focusing on radiation. I've leased two 5 mCi Po-210 static eliminators and bought two thin pieces of beryllium, a bunch of HDPE sheets to moderate the neutrons, and some elements and their oxides that have high neutron cross sections. I had already done some basic stuff before with radioactive materials, and I already have two GM counters and a low-resolution but functional gamma spectrometer, along with some sealed radioisotope sources (Cs-137, Mn-54, Co-60, Na-22, and Tl-204) and a couple small pieces of uranium and thorium metal and some ore of both. All the stuff I need for neutron activation has arrived, and I'm already irradiating stuff with my little PoBe sources. I've actually been successful with Mn and In so far, with more to come! I'll start a thread about this project in the radiation detection forum.

I would love to build a fusor, but as an indebted grad student without that much technical know-how, I think it will remain outside my reach for quite a while. But I've had fun lurking here and learning about the fusors others have made. And I guess you could call Be-9 + He-4 --> C-12 + n a fusion reaction, so maybe you could say I have the lazy/poor man's fusor. ;)
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