If you\u2019re looking for a great beach chair read, something enjoyable and informative, I can recommend \u201cNeutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe,\u201d by Ray Jayawardhana. I might write about the book some other time, but, for now, I\u2019m going to pursue a tangent that the book inspired. That tangent is a gas called \u201cargon.\u201d <\/p>\n
Argon is all around you. You\u2019re breathing it right now. Argon, as a matter of fact, is the third most abundant gas in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
And yet it doesn\u2019t get much attention. That doesn\u2019t seem fair to poor old argon. After all, third place will get you a bronze medal in the Olympics. Third place will get you a winning \u201cshow\u201d payoff in a horse race. You\u2019d think, then, that argon deserves something more than obscurity for its efforts.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not total obscurity I guess. I have seen the name a few times. In some long-ago grade school science class I remember a single, curt line from a textbook stating that the earth\u2019s atmosphere in 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and 0.93 percent argon. And then in school to learn how to drive airplanes we were taught the same thing, including, notably, that very precise-sounding zero-point-nine-three percent figure. <\/p>\n
We hear about nitrogen and oxygen all the time, of course, but for me, argon was just a disembodied word, something I recognized on a test but that had no other associations.<\/p>\n
As for the neutrino-hunting realm, argon is used in certain scientific instruments relating to the study of neutrinos. That\u2019s how it earned a mention in the \u201cNeutrino Hunters\u201d book, and that\u2019s why I decided to finally take a look at this argon thing. <\/p>\n
Argon, as it turns out, is one of several \u201cnoble gasses,\u201d gasses that don\u2019t readily react with other elements. Since it\u2019s not inclined to react with other elements, argon\u2019s good behavior makes it useful in some welding applications, in some sorts of diving situations (where it supplants nitrogen), in lamps and lights (sometimes in combination with other noble gasses), and in various scientific and industrial applications that I\u2019ll never be able to understand. <\/p>\n
Some other noble gasses, sort of siblings to argon, get more name recognition at the street level. Helium, for example, is well-known as the stuff they put in blimps and balloons. It\u2019s also very important for the cooling circuits in medical imaging equipment. The U.S., in fact, has a strategic helium reserve. <\/p>\n
Another famous noble gas is neon, the stuff that\u2019s used in store signs.<\/p>\n
Some other noble gasses probably aren\u2019t as famous, but we hear about them sometimes in industrial applications. These include xenon and krypton, which, like neon, are established players in the light business. <\/p>\n
Another noble gas, radon, is radioactive, and is a health threat if it seeps from the earth into your house. That\u2019s a problem in some parts of the world, but I\u2019ve never heard of it being a factor in Saipan. <\/p>\n
In order to isolate them and bottle them up for use, argon, neon, and several other gasses are culled from the air by freezing the air into a liquid state, and then separating the gasses as the air warms up again. <\/p>\n
Helium, incidentally, isn\u2019t gathered from the air. It\u2019s so light that it just floats away and the atmosphere can\u2019t retain it. Helium, however, is often co-located with natural gas deposits, so it\u2019s harvested as a byproduct of natural gas wells.<\/p>\n
Nature\u2019s noble elements are listed in the far right-hand column of the periodic table of the elements. Take a look at the table, and you\u2019ll see them listed by their two-letter symbols, which, going from lightest to heaviest, are He (helium), Ne (neon), Ar (argon; yea, argon!), Kr (krypton), Xe (xenon), and Rn (radon).<\/p>\n
Overall, then, my impression of argon is that it\u2019s a friendly and unassuming element. It\u2019s happy to just be argon, and it doesn\u2019t go looking for trouble. It doesn\u2019t mess with or corrode the other materials out there. It doesn\u2019t mess with those of us who are breathing it, either. And it helps scientists and inventors do, uh, scientific and inventive things. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s not a bad tally in my book. So let\u2019s raise a toast to argon this weekend. For a third place finisher with a zero-point-nine-three percent score, I\u2019d say that argon has held its own pretty well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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