Dedication.

Oh wow, it's December.

Yup.

This week was the last week of classes for the fall semester! That's almost equally crazy. So today I had a presentation for my lab class, which was in lieu of a lab report for one of five physics labs this semester. My partner and I talked about a nuclear lab we did, in which radiation spectra were taken of a few different sources. But since it was the one required lab for everyone, we wanted to focus less on rehashing every single experiment and instead we focused on the practical side of the experiment. Namely, how do you decide what detector is appropriate for an experiment? So for a lot of our presentation we contrasted the main types of detectors.

Okay. So there's this class of detectors called scintillators, which means that the detector absorbs a high energy and emits a lower energy. The first scintillators used were in about 1906, way before technology caught up to the science they were trying to do. So they had materials that emitted visible light when hit by radiation. They would actually take a piece of the material under a microscope and count the flashes of light as it was hit by radiation.

Wow. That's some dedication to science.