ABSTRACT
The German scientist has been using a carbon ‘time machine’ to go back to the dawn of earth and detect the tell-tale spoor of untold trillions of photosynthesizing bacteria. When carbon atoms are admitted as a gas into the tube, the net result is that these force fields create twin orbital streams of two types of carbon atom. Chemically, the two types of carbon atom are for most purposes identical, but the relative sizes of their orbits in the mass spectrometer tell that one type of carbon atom is 12 times heavier than a hydrogen atom and is called the carbon-12 isotope. Plant-eating creatures, animals who eat plant-eating creatures, and animals like who are both are, of course, all consequently built out of this fractionally lighter carbon. The relative amounts of carbon-12 and carbon-13 can vary depending on the history undergone by the carbon.
