Isotopes and the natural environment / Изотопы и окружающая среда

This book is partially derived from—and based upon—a course by the same name that I used to deliver at Queen’s University in Canada. It was a course that I loved teaching, but it was not always very straightforward for students: they found it at first intimidating (Isotopes? What’s that?), then complex, then downright difficult. However, by the end of the course each and every student learned to appreciate the significance and importance of isotopes when used as an investigative tool in the natural sciences.

To help students recognise the importance of isotopes in the natural sciences, I devised a simple game, in the form of a bet. At the very beginning of the semester, during my introductory lecture, I will explain that isotopes are applicable to absolutely every branch of the natural sciences. Then I will offer them the bet (or was it a bait?): If a student manages, by the end of the semester, to find an example, any example, of a field belonging to the natural sciences where isotopes are not of any use, have never been of any use, and likely will never be of any use, that student will receive a 100% mark for the course; this is upon condition that the example is well substantiated.

Students invariably accepted the bet: they were certain that there must be something out there that is not, in any way, related to isotopes. Just as invariably, no student ever claimed the prize. When I reminded them of our bet, during the last lecture, and invited them to step forward and attempt it, they ruefully replied that there is no way they can win (and sometimes even hinted that the bet was not fair). As they put it, well, everything material is made of isotopes and these isotopes constantly change (through fractionation or disintegration), meaning that every process that has affected a material object will be reflected in the isotopic composition of that objec <...>