Talk:Cloud chamber

IT WAS UPWARD-MOVING, NOT DOWNWARD
The photograph of the first identified positron is upside down in the article! See for example Anderson's Nobel Lecture and "Landmarks: The First Positron". Could someone please turn the image to the correct orientation. --Teh Lee 25 Arpl 2006 22:45 (BST)

Doesn't the interaction of high energy particles with the vapor atoms cause the particles to behave/move different than they would without interaction, therefore making it hard or impossible to say how the particles would actually move under "normal conditions"? --Abdull 6 July 2005 10:30 (UTC)

Champagne
I read once that under certain conditions, the cloud of carbon dioxide that forms in the top of a champagne bottle when it is opened behaves as a particle detector, and that this phenomenon is the basis of the invention of the cloud chamber particle detector. Unfortunately I cannot find a corroboration of this bit of information, which I read some years ago. --McDogm 14:11, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

I think the link: http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~adf4/cloud.html How to Build a Cloud Chamber is no longer active

Non-Theoretical Language
Could we not have a some degree of an explanation couched in non-theoretical language please? Perhaps a description of the workings of the chamber which does not require a detailed understanding of the various inter-relating concepts of the theory. Thank you. Nicander (talk) 14:09, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Wilson cloud
What about to move the part about cloud to its own article? It is a quite different thing, it should have its own article. Miraceti (talk) 10:20, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Link Removal
Hi,

the Link http://www.bigs.de/BLH/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=72&Itemid=240 has been removed by User:DVdm for the reason: " per WP:EL and WP:PROMO - removed add for commercial website.". The website contains an animation of a cloud chamber. It has modest references to the company that provides the animation, but shows no big ads or banners - the animation is clearly in the focus. As I have somebody asking in the german-language support-team why that link (and similar ones in other articles) had to be removed, I'd be happy to get an explanation. --Superbass (talk) 09:36, 31 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi Superbass, you find the rationale for the removal at User_talk:OrangeDog. I checked a handful of those links, and the ones I checked were of very poor quality and didn't add anything new to the article. If we find that the article is really crippled without the link, I will not stand in the way when this one is reinserted. But let's not make a habit here. Cheers. DVdm (talk) 18:18, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Hi DVdm, thanks for the explanation. I am not an Physicist and can not judge the quality of that animation. All I can see is that the website shows an animation of a cloud chamber. The article does not have an animation, nor do the other weblinks have one. Unless the animation isn't incorrect or useless, I guess it does add something new for the article? --Superbass (talk) 18:46, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
 * If other contributors to this article think the link is needed, we can re-insert it. Otherwise I propose we go by elementary wp:EL -- we already have five external links for a rather short article. DVdm (talk) 08:45, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I'd be happy if some qualified person could sort the links by quality or relevance, so that five are kept and one or more dispensable ones are removed, giving a short explanation. If my questioner's link had a weak quality or relevance, I could explain that to him easily. Without a clear statement concerning its quality it is hard to explain to him, why that link is worse than any other. The same applies to the other articles where those animations were removed as weblinks. --Superbass (talk) 18:35, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, as a qualified person I had a look at this animation. It doesn't add anything to the article that isn't already there. It isn't even a real animation. Conceptually it is just a few still pictures. This is extremely poor quality, just like most animations on that site. So i.m.o. it definitely should not be here, per elementary WP:EL. Now, if your questioner needs a more detailed explanation, he is free to come here and get an explanation, unless of course your questioner happens to be, who was recently blocked as a single-purpose account for spamming his personal work (see his contributions, talk page and block log). I think we better leave it at this, unless a number of other (regular) editors of this article insist that this so-called animation should be taken back on board. DVdm (talk) 18:57, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks so far - it is obviously not the case that a number of other editors wants those links in en:wp articles, although I asked ad the WikiProject Physics for opinions. I can explain that to my questioner who, by the way, claims not to be able to speak English, that's why he asked the Support (OTRS) Team. --Superbass (talk) 21:28, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

First Radioactivity detector cloudy boy
I would like to point out that Zinc-sulphide screens had been used to detect radioactivity for many years before the invention of the cloud chamber. The cloud chamber is therefore not the first radioactivity decector, and someone should remove the sentance that says it is. 81.187.148.35 (talk) 16:35, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
 * You are not wrong. In addition: Becquerel's first (serendipitous) detection of radiation from a uranium salt was with a photographic plate.  The earliest quantitative measurement of ionizing radiation was done using an electrometer (the Curies, Becquerel and others, no doubt).  I will be that someone for you - offending words removed Moletrouser (talk) 11:50, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Water Cooled Ethylene Glycol Cloud Chambers
I tried searching extensively for information on these and couldn't find anything substantiating their existence. Almost everything I could find is just quoting the wikipedia article. If nobody can find a valid citation showing that these exist then I think that the mention of them should be removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 169.237.43.243 (talk) 17:37, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Rutherford, and other expansion
This article makes no reference to Rutherford’s experiments, or the influence (forward and back) between him and Wilson. This writeup in the BJHS seems, at a glance, like a good place to start:. (Given time, I may come back to work on it myself, but this note is open to anyone reading because I have other obligations at the moment.) — HTGS (talk) 05:27, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Saturated vs. Supersaturated
It's not really supersaturated if the droplets go away after several seconds. Supersaturation implies the vapor is in a metastable state with a chemical potential beyond that of the liquid, and sufficient perturbations will cause condensation and establish vapor-liquid equilibrium.

A cloud chamber, unless I'm misunderstanding something, is a saturated vapor, usually in equilibrium with the liquid below it. The ions serve as nucleation sites and change the chemical potential of the water molecules, resulting in the trail of condensed droplets, but the vapor is saturated, not supersaturated. Kaiserkarl13 (talk) 18:12, 25 April 2023 (UTC)