Some Erwin guy told me that the first step is to find a cat.
Jokes aside, the strategy seems elegant, even given the physical restrictions mentioned in the intro.
First, almost all charge changes are measured to be in the positive direction—i.e., the spheres nearly always lose more electrons than protons for both the α and β decays in the decay chain
This is bugging me a bit - why would α decay increase the charge? Since you're expelling a positively charged particle, I'd expect a decrease; and if the α particles are trapped on the silica, or steal electrons from it, you'd expect no change in charge. Perhaps the rest of the article mentions the reason (I'm still digging through it).
This is bugging me a bit - why would α decay increase the charge?
What is changing is the net charge, which refers to an excess of negative or positive charge. A neutral atom has the same number of protons as it does electrons, and so its net charge is 0. In a decay process an atom will emit, create, and/or annihilate different types of particles directly as part of the decay event, and immediately after the decay there can also be ionization events in which the excited daughter atom and even atoms around it can eject electrons (for example, via the Auger effect, emission of secondary electrons via impact ionization, and other processess).
Got it - thanks for the explanation!
