Word: atom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Sir John Cockcroft, 70, dean of British nuclear physicists; of a heart attack; in Cambridge, England. In 1932, Cockcroft and his research partner, E.T.S. Walton, were the first to release atomic energy by splitting the atom with proton "bullets" in a linear accelerator instead of using naturally radioactive particles, the previous technique. That breakthrough led to the development of the atom bomb anc won the partners the Nobel Prize fo Physics in 1951. By then, Sir John was director of the Harwell atomic research center, pointing Britain's nuclear capability toward peaceful applica tions, including her first nuclear...
...uranium, the heaviest element that exists naturally on earth. Gradually these "transuranium" elements disappeared, decomposing by radioactive decay into lighter and more stable elements. During the past few decades, however, at least eleven transuranium elements and their isotopes have reappeared, thanks to the ingenuity of man. In their latest atomic synthesis, nuclear physicists have produced the heaviest atom known to man, a new isotope of the element mendelevium, which itself was first artificially created...
...released only after his bail had been reduced from $25,000 to $15,000 (bondsmen would not put up the bail, which had to be raised in toto among S.N.C.C sympathizers). "If President Johnson is worried about my rifle," he said on leaving jail, "wait until I get my atom bomb...
...affluent Manhattan insurance broker, Holt's own education included Switzerland's elite Le Rosey, Phillips Exeter and Yale ('44). Once fascinated by physics as "a way of getting at the truth of things," Holt's confidence in schooling was first shaken when the atom was split. His Exeter teacher simply asked his class to pencil out of their textbooks the basic law, "Matter is neither created nor destroyed"-and all blithely did so without quiver or question. To Holt, this was clear evidence that his fellow students had no genuine interest in physics...
...tenet that the mind may be the prisoner of a secret code, locked in the unconscious, that often has as little to do with conscious reality as the rules of grammar have to do with the function of speech. If order exists anywhere-in the behavior of the atom, the dance of heated particles, the orbit of the stars-then, say the structuralists, order must exist everywhere, even in the brain. Just as the law of gravity determined the fall of Newton's apple, so the laws of the intellect imperiously mold human thought...