East Bay Tutors

About East Bay

According to East Bay tutors one of the best universities in the country is located here, University of California, Berkeley. The University of California Berkeley has a very distinguished faculty and alumni, and is very proud to have discovered sixteen elements on the periodic table: americium, astatine, berkelium, californium, curium, dubnium, einsteinium, fermium, lawrencium, mendelevium, molybdenum, neptunium, nobelium, plutonium, seaborgium, and technetium.

When these elements were discovered, beginning in the 1950s, there was some dispute between research laboratories about which team found the elements first. In 1957 a research laboratory in Sweden maintained that they discovered element number 102, Nobelium. A different research group located in the Soviet Union (Russia) came forward and said that they had in fact discovered the very same element, but had managed to do it a whole year earlier in 1956. The Soviet Union team claimed that they simply had not yet published their results. An impartial team was created known as the Transfermium Working Group (TWG), whose job it was to go out and log who found what first took five years going between the various research groups who had laid claim to the discovery of elements at one time or another to decipher who deserved recognition for the discovery.

Each of these labs was using what is called a “cyclotron”. According to East Bay tutors this was invented by Ernest O. Lawrence, who founded the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He was a nuclear scientist and himself won a Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the cyclotron, as it was integral in the research on isotope separation. He was a full professor at the University of California in the 1930s, and lawrencium; chemical element number 103, that was discovered at Berkeley in 1961 was named in his honor. The first cyclotron cost approximately $25 to manufacture and was small enough to be held in the palm of one hand. Lawrence created it using brass, sealing wax and wire. The purpose of its design was to obtain particles of an extremely high energy. His invention involved using two semi-circular electrodes; the protons would pass in a circular motion between these two electrodes connected to an alternating potential because they are held by the magnetic field. The protons turning round and round and picking up speed would eventually create a high-energy beam. Once the basic principle was figured out, Lawrence set about changing the scale of the cyclotron in order to make it even more powerful.