It is the holiday season, and you wish to celebrate properly. For your family, you want nothing but the best. For example, you think a bottle or two of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1937, a so-so, medium Bordeaux, would be suitable for the occasion. Yet, at $2500 a bottle, you want to be sure you’re buying the real thing. This is a serious testing problem. After all you can’t open the bottle to peek inside. Nope, the bottle is sealed. Then what? Ask an expert? Until recently, that was all you could do. But now, with many thanks to atomic physics, you can test what level of radioactivity from Cesium-137 is present. This isotope of Cesium is manmade, not occurring in nature. The first quantities were produced in 1952, and is now present in most wines produced after that time, owing to nuclear disasters such as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident. So, if your Chateau Lafite ‘37 tests positive Cesium 137, you know it’s fake. I, for one, will never be so f
Random thoughts and used ideas