Word: atom
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...scientists are suited by temperament and intellect to keep vigil on the heights where paradoxes flourish in the wind of metaphysics and knowledge fades into the unknown-to clock the flight of star clouds, chop the atom's nucleus into mathematical hash or chase the primordial life-germ through a thicket of test tubes. Some workers must patrol the vales & swales where humbler things may be found beneath any stone. Such upturned stones during the past fortnight disclosed the following...
Millikan's Photons. It seemed natural to Dr. Millikan that the cosmic rays were light rays or photons of enormously high frequency and short wave length. He concluded that they were the by-products of atom-building in interstellar space; that when light-weight atoms suddenly combined to form heavier ones, a slight excess of matter-like bricklayer's mortar scraped from the wall-was turned into high-frequency light according to the Einstein equation. To him this was a peculiarly satisfying interpretation as it bespoke "the Creator still...
...imperfect or if the materials are not the best in the tiny arena where the gigantic crush is finally focused, steel is likely to bulge like butter. Squeezed by 300 tons per sq. in., some of the contraction of a substance is due to a shrinkage of the atoms themselves. The complex atom of cesium shrinks most of all metals. Of 48 metals under high pressure, 39 become better conductors of electricity. Iron grows softer, glass harder. Squeezed water turns solid (''ice") in five different forms, one of which does not melt until heated to nearly...
From the shoulders of these two finds, atomic destruction and transmutation took fresh impetus the world over. Unencumbered by electric charges, neutrons as atom-wreckers are like wrestlers slippery with oil. They slide through the electronic field guarding the nucleus, do not swerve until they strike the hard core. Dr. Ernest Orlando Lawrence, who has an 85-ton magnet to play with on the University of California campus, produced a beam of 10,000,000 neutrons a second by smashing lightweight elements with deutons (nuclei of heavy hydrogen). With "slow neutrons" lately it has been found possible to produce gamma...
Some 14 years ago big-eyed, bushy-haired Peter Kapitza emerged from Leningrad's Polytechnical Institute, went to England's Cambridge, puttered with radioactivity. It occurred to him that he might learn much about the atom if he could wrench at it with tremendous magnetic forces. His first apparatus was a battery of accumulators short-circuiting through a wire coil, producing a momentary magnetic field of high power. Next he designed a huge dynamo to provide the short-circuiting power. With this the coils blew up. Kapitza stopped that by chilling the coils with liquid helium...