Word: atomization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chemistry prize. So when Robert Huber, the managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry near Munich, received his telephone call from Sweden, the champagne was readily at hand. Huber, 51, and fellow West Germans Johann Deisenhofer, 45, and Hartmut Michel, 40, were recognized for revealing the "atom by atom" structure of the molecule at the heart of photosynthesis, the process by which sunlight is converted into the chemical energy that fuels plant and animal life...
...matter and the forces which hold them together--encounters a problem which other popularizers of biology, astronomy and evolution have not: the inherent abstractness of particle physics. Whereas most people wonder at the changing phases of the moon or the workings of their own bodies, few wonder how an atom is constructed, simply becuase they have never seen an atom...
Forced to concoct a drama, Glashow chooses as his story the constant intersections of theory and observation that led to the currently held beliefs about the structure of the atom. Just as in The Double Helix, another popular scientific work about an abstract theory, the scientist's own life takes on great importance. Interactions goes beyond simply imparting Glashow's knowledge of elementary particle physics (the realm of quarks, strangeness, charm and color)in an effort to present what he terms a "scientific autobiography...
...most stimulating parts of the book are those that deal directly with elementary-particle theory and its historical development. The history of nuclear physics in the 20th century begins in 1911 when Ernest Rutherford disproved, through relatively simple experiments, the dominant scientific theories which viewed the atom as a "large, soft and spongy pudding with electrons embedded in it." Rutherford concluded instead that there was a hard and heavy center to the atom, around which electrons orbit...
This discovery eventually led to the simple model of the atom which is still taught in high school physics courses: the nucleus consists of positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons, around which negatively charged electrons orbit. Yet the continuous discovery of new particles, such as the unstable muon, challenged this simple theory. In addition, this theory raised further theoretical questions: how was the nucleus held together? Why did radioactive decay exist...