Word: atomically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Spewed forth in various highways and byways during the average Harvard week are some thirty extra-curricular lectures and informal talks. Audiences attending them range from three to several hundred, while the subjects may be anything from Atom Smashing to the Future of the British Empire. Some of these lectures are scoteric and unpalatable, others vital and appealing; rarely do any of them obtain the hearing or the permanence to which they are entitled...
Members of the group will assemble in Jefferson 250 and then proceed to the MacKay Laboratories to see the Cyclotron in action deo volente. Professor Saunders says that it has been working well of late hurling an 11,000,000 atom-smashing volt "bullet." The tour will include several other representative pieces of the research constantly in progress at the Laboratories...
Science popularizers like to point out with bated breath that there is enough atomic energy locked in a cupful of water to drive a big liner across the Atlantic. To hardheaded physicists, the idea of releasing and harnessing this energy was a wild dream. Then, early in 1939, Hahn and Strassmann of Germany, with help from France, Sweden and Denmark, used neutrons to break uranium atoms into two nearly equal fragments, with release of some 200,000,000 electron-volts of atomic energy per atom (TIME, Feb. 6; March 13). This was by far the most violent atomic explosion ever...
...Atom-smashing used to be one of the purest of pure sciences, but it is rapidly grossening toward practicality. Substances made artificially radioactive in atom-smashing machines are used for cancer research and other biological studies, so that atomic experimenters now turn out -though with their left hand - products of commercial value. Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co., which is interested in the practical business of making money but also has a reputation for farsightedness, has built a giant atom-smasher, the only one possessed by any industrial laboratory...
Last week Westinghouse staged a special demonstration of recent and current research, with the atom-smasher as star performer. Spectators handed the operators silver coins which were put under the atom-smasher, made artificially radioactive, returned to the nervous owners - who were assured that their gingered-up coins were harmless, would cease to radiate in a few days...