Chapter 16 Summary and Reflection

     In chapter 16, Kean starts by talking about the journey of Englishman Robert Falcon Scott and his five companions to the South Pole. Scott and his companions wanted to be the first people in the world to get there first, but when they arrived a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen had gotten there before Scott. The travelers would have been able to get back home safely had they not been marooned on the South Pole for weeks by snow flurries. To make matters worse, the tin cans that they had filled with fuel lost all of their fuel by leaking. Then the tin cans went through something called tin leprosy where the tin can rearrange itself into two different solids because of temperature. Tin has two solids; beta and alpha. Regular tin as a solid is in its beta form and when the temperature is very low, the tin rearranges itself to its alpha state and becomes a white powder. Robert Falcon Scott and his companions eventually died on the South Pole, but it didn't go unnoticed.

     Kean then goes on to mention the other elements that were put through extreme temperatures in order to find a solid sample. Xenon and krypton were put to temperatures as low as -240 F. Trying to turn xenon and krypton into solids was child's play compared to trying to get a solid sample of argon. Argon eventually had to interact with fluorine and cesium iodide at -445 F degrees to get the first and only solid sample of argon. Kean also talks about how laser beams come to be and it's all thanks to elements like yttrium and neodymium. In fact, the most powerful laser has more power than the US and it uses crystals of yttrium spiked with neodymium. While lasers produce light in visible light, masers don't as they produce it in microwaves. Masers were considered something impossible before Charles Townes began working on them and his work earned him a Nobel Prize in 1964.

     This chapter was interesting but confusing. The chapter wasn't really connected with the extreme low temperatures affecting elements and the new state of matter by Einstein and Bose. That was really confusing to me. Of course I'd like to learn more about this subject, but I would have preferred the author to explain the topic a bit more clearly. Learning about the lasers was very interesting because I had no idea how they worked. I always assumed that the bulbs inside of the lasers contained neon and that's what made the beam shine so I enjoyed finding about the real truth when it comes to lasers.