Word: atomically
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...American, British and Soviet leaders met at Yalta at a time when the Red Army had liberated most of Eastern Europe from Hitler's troops and were poised to take Berlin. Although the ailing Roosevelt knew that the U.S. could soon assault Japan with the first atom bomb, his top military advisers doubted that its use would be immediately decisive. An American priority at Yalta was to ensure Japan's quick defeat by persuading Stalin to join the Far East conflict once Germany surrendered...
...they are not animal, vegetable and mineral. In fact, all the matter most people are familiar with can be subsumed within one family of particles. This family includes the common electron, which hovers around the nucleus of the atom; the "up" and "down" varieties of quarks, now known to be the constituents of protons and neutrons; and an obscure particle known as the electron neutrino. Neutrinos have no charge and no measured mass, yet are thought to be among the most abundant particles in the universe...
Ramsey was awarded half of the $470,000 prize for his contributions in pioneering a method of measuring the minute movements that occur inside atoms. Ramsey's so-called separated oscillatory fields technique did not just become a valuable scientific tool; it also provided the basis for modern-day atomic clocks. Like the ticking of a pendulum in a grandfather clock, the rapid-fire (9,192,631.770 times a second) oscillations of cesium-atom nuclei, spinning like tops inside a magnetic field, can be used to pace off time...
Dehmelt has performed other small miracles as well. By creating an electromagnetic "cradle," he has kept a lone electron suspended in a vacuum for months at a time. He has also succeeded in observing the fabled quantum jump of a single trapped atom as it absorbed energy and then emitted it in the form of light...
After the atoms are deflected by another magnet, the change in its path caused by the oscillating field can be detected, and from this the frequency of the atom's internal rotation can be measured...