Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My teacher gave me an homework assignment concerning CU/64. I tried to Google information about it, but there was very little. I need to find who discovered it.

Cu is the chemical symbol for copper. Elemental copper has a standard atomic weight of 63.546 g/mol.
I'm guessing that your "CU/64" is what chemists would consider "Cu 63.5.

Try searching for "Copper Age". Lots of luck on figuring out who discovered copper as there are artifacts that date back to 9000 BC.

Hi HolyCatty,

It's likely that your assignment refers to the particular isotope of copper with a mass number of 64 = 29 protons (constant for Cu) + 35 neutrons (isotope-specific). The standard atomic weight of an element, such as 63.546, is an average of the masses of all the element's different isotopes weighted by how common they are.

Note that we're mainly here for help with science projects, not homework assignments. These two sites might or might not qualify as good primary sources (especially since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone), but they both list a number of references that could help you get started, in addition to putting "copper isotopes", "copper-64 discovery", etc into a search engine:

http://www.webelements.com/copper/isotopes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper-64

Good luck,
Amanda

Thanks for the suggestions searching "Copper Age" and stuff. I"ll go search it up right now XD

agm wrote:It's likely that your assignment refers to the particular isotope of copper with a mass number of 64 = 29 protons (constant for Cu) + 35 neutrons (isotope-specific). The standard atomic weight of an element, such as 63.546, is an average of the masses of all the element's different isotopes weighted by how common they are.

Because the Cu 64 isotope is NOT naturally occurring and copper plates have been common targets starting with the earliest high energy accelerator physics experiments, I doubt that one could figure out who was the first to discover that particular isotope.
In any case, ask you teacher what was meant by the question as there are several interpretations.