Word: alfv
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...beach house in La Jolla, Calif., Hannes Alfvén returned to bed after he got the news. Inside his lab in Buenos Aires, Luis Leloir squirmed uncomfortably as his colleagues toasted him with test tubes and flasks filled with Old Smuggler Scotch. At a restaurant in France, Louis Néel barely bothered to interrupt his lunch. "There are only a few Nobel prizes," he explained, "yet there are many good physicists." The modesty of the 1970 Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry last week was becoming, but less than indicative of their achievements...
...Alfvén, 62, a Swedish physicist, was cited for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of plasmas-the ionized (electrically charged) gases that make up the bulk of matter in the universe. Ignored at first, his work became important in the late 1940s when the plasma waves he had postulated were detected in the laboratory. Soon his theories may produce a bigger dividend: physicists are convinced that plasmas offer the only practical means of attaining the enormous temperatures (630 million degrees F.) needed for controlled nuclear fusion. Restlessly, Alfvén has already expanded into other fields: cosmology...
...shares the physics prize with Alfvén for his penetrating research into magnetism. In the early 1930s, physicists explained that magnetism in materials like iron is caused by their electrons all spinning in the same direction. Neel contended that there was another form of magnetism in which the electrons of neighboring atoms whirled in opposite directions, thereby all but canceling out the observable field. The existence of this phenomenon, antiferromagnetism, was subsequently confirmed in such substances as manganese salts. Later, Néel discovered still another form of magnetism called ferrimagnetism, in which some of the spins...
Asteroid walks would be high adventure. Weighing less than an ounce in full space gear, an astronaut might jump half a mile off the surface before drifting gently back down. But Alfvèn and Arrhenius suggest limiting such activity to asteroids at least a mile across...
...undertake such an adventure in the near future, there is little time to lose. In 1975, Alfvèn and Arrhenius note, an asteroid that seems almost ideal for exploration will come within 14 million miles of earth. It is 15 miles long and five miles wide, and will be traveling only 5,600 m.p.h. relative to the earth. That asteroid is Buck Rogers' favorite: Eros...