The Effect of Dishware
Note: Diagram not to scale.
Setup
In this experiment, identical dishes were stacked on top of the detector one at a time.
The detector was run in coincidence mode with a heading of N57W. All tests were run indoors.
A control test was conducted with no dishes. Following that test, dishes were stacked on top of each other one at a time until the stack height reached six dishes. Each condition was run for a total of 10 minutes.
Similar to the book experiment, this experiment is susceptible to systemic error; the area of the field of cosmic particle detection increases by a function of a(x^2) as height increases, yet the diameter of the dishes remains constant as stack height increases.
Ideally, the dimensions of the dishes should increase to to fill the area of cosmic particle detection as the stack gets taller, but such is not the case in this experiment.
The chi squared per degrees of freedom value for the graph's trendline is 1.8
Results
Similar to the book experiment, the data spread reflects a pattern of normal distribution and shows that the dishes have no effect on the rate of cosmic particle detection. However, as this experiment is prone to systemic error, this conclusion cannot be drawn.
It is possible that a greater stack height (in which the dimensions of the dishes increase to fill the area of cosmic particle detection as the stack height increases) would affect the rate of cosmic particle detection.
Experiment Setup - Photo
Note: The photo is a reconstruction of the original experiment designed to give viewers a better understanding of the experiment setup. As it is a reconstruction, all and any values displayed in the photo (heading, light level, dish stack orientation, surroundings, etc.) are not to be considered as true to the original experiment.