Word: atomically
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...shaggy ghosts, and behind them lights marked the 500-ft. tower that held the bomb. Near by, TV crewmen turned their great searchlights toward the ground to warm themselves in their artificial sunlight. The desert was bitter cold, and no one seemed to have enough clothing, except, perhaps, veteran Atom-Bomb Watcher Leonard. He was encased in layers of woolens. wearing a cowboy hat with a brim curled like a potato chip...
Actually, says DuBridge, science is merely one path to greater understanding. "Men climb Mt. Everest, explore the bottom of the sea, sail to the far corners of the earth, explore the atom, the crystal and the stars-all because they are born explorers . . . Are science and engineering just the tools for man's amusement and for his ultimate destruction? Let us say, rather-and more truthfully-that they are his ... tools in his eternal struggle to achieve his highest ... spiritual ends...
...first measured the charge of the electron. Nobel Laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan unlocked the mysteries of the chromosome, and Richard Tolman helped prepare the way for the modern theory of chemical-reaction rates. Richard Badger's rule described the relationship between the vibration and size of two-atom molecules. Through his work on the red and yellow pigments of such plants as carrots and tomatoes, Laszlo Zechmeister has determined some of the molecular configurations that are effective precursors of vitamin...
...through their study of the laws of aerodynamics, the design of better airplanes. But the work of Nobel Chemist Linus Pauling is of a more rarefied order. The foremost pioneer in applying the quantum theory to the study of chemical bonds, he found that the "resonance" of the atom is the source of the forces that hold molecules together. He discovered the alpha helix as the fundamental feature of many proteins, went on to explore the architecture of protein, the fundamental substance of living organisms. On the surface, such work often seems remote from practicality, but it has helped chemists...
...Caltech well know, nature does not give up her secrets easily. There is, says Carl Anderson, no way to see the atom or examine it at first hand. "It must be studied by indirect evidence, and the technical difficulty involved has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark." But for all the exacting labor, adds Physicist Feynman, "there is a great thrill - a real emotional thrill - when you discover something interesting." The mission of Caltech: to pass on that sense...