Environmental Chemist

Environmental chemists try to understand how chemicals move through the environment and their effects on human health and the environment itself. This is done through field and laboratory work, including measurements, data interpretation and computer modelling.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• To become an entry- level environmental chemist you need a bachelor of science in environmental chemistry or a closely related flied such as organic chemistry.
• To work as a consultant for environmental chemist you require a masters degree in environmental chemistry or a closely related flied.
• If you would like to do research and or have a teaching position  at an university you will need a PhD in environmental chemistry or a closely related flied.

To become an environmental chemist you can study at the following universities:

1. Otago
2. Massey
3. Waikato
4. AUT (Auckland university)
5. Canterbury
6. Victoria

To be able to study environmentel chemistrty at universiry you need to take the following subjects:

• biological sciences
• chemistry
• geography
• geology

Bill Bryson - The Mighty Atom

Bill Bryson - The Mighty Atom

The Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one statement it would be: 'All things are made of atoms'. Everything you can touch and see around you is made up of atoms, including the air.

Atoms combine together to form molecules. At sea level, an object the size of a sugar cube will contain 45 billion billion molecules. Half a million atoms lined up side by side could still hide behind a single human hair. This shows how tiny atoms and molecules are and that there are a lot of them.

Atoms are also fantastically durable. They are passed from stars, to people, to plants. It has been suggested that a billion of the atoms that form a part of you, once belonged to William Shakespeare. So in a way, we are all reincarnations. When we die our atoms will be disassembled and reused into something else eg. another person, water, or a leaf. It has also been estimated that atoms can survive as long as 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

In the 1800s scientists such as John Dalton theorized the construction of atoms and molecules but because they are so tiny, it as impossible to prove who's theories were correct. This was the case until Earnest Rutherford conducted a series of experiments at Cambridge University in 1910. Rutherford's experiments proved atoms have a dense nucleus made up of neutrons, protons (positive charge), with electrons (negative charge) orbiting the nucleus. The nucleus only occupies 1 millionth of a billionth of the atom's full volume and atoms are essentially made up of empty space. If you expanded an atom to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would only be the size of a fly in the middle of it, except the fly would be thousands of times heavier than the cathedral.

As all things are made up of atoms and atoms are almost completely empty space, you might wonder why you don't just fall through the floor when standing on it. This doesn't happen because the negative charge the electrons have, repels the negative charge from atoms that it comes in contact with. So while you think you are standing of the floor, you're actually levitating 1 atom above the floor.

Further research that happened after 1905 by Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein gave rise to a theory called Quantum mechanics which describes the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. These theories have been tested and proven to be correct although from our everyday experiences they sound crazy. The current experiments at C.E.R.N using the large Hadron Collider are continuing to explore atoms and the very small world.

- Ella Jackson

Bill Bryson - Einstein's Universe

In Bill Bryson's A Short History of Everything, he writes a chapter about Einsteins Universe, in which he talks about the speed of light and other things. At the start of this chapter Bryson talks about the speed of light and how in the 1800s when physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley accidentally discovered the Ether, A medium that was thought to permeate the earth.This was needed in the 1800s when physicists thought that light and electromagnetism were seen as waves. Skip ahead a couple years and you find yourself Max Planck, a 42 year-old theoretical physicist at the university of Berlin. Planck unveiled a new quantum theory, which posited that energy is not a continuous thing like flowing water but comes in individualized packets, which he called quanta.This becomes relevant when talking about Einstien. Now on to everybody's favorite person, Alert Einstein, born in Ulm in 1879 Ablert wasn't a stand out kid, until later in life when he wrote the scientific paper "On the Electrodynamics of moving bodies". His famous equation "E = McSquared" came months later. In essence what relativity is, is your position relative to the moving object. Bryson goes on to talk about space time, and how gravity is a byproduct of space time. Edwin Hubble, the greatest astronomer of the 20th century, because he tackled these 2 questions. How old is the universe? and how big is it?. Although he did this, he couldn't understand why the universe never stopped expanding, that was discovered by Belgium pries-scholar Goerges Lemaitre who said that, the universe began as a geometric point, a 'primeval atom' , which burst into glory and hasn't stopped ever since.