Word: atomize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...closeness to Beria, Stalin's last secret-police chief (1938-53), whom he served as a spy master, put him in a position to know. But Sudoplatov's most stunning charge -- that world-renowned physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr and Leo Szilard knowingly funneled U.S. atom-bomb secrets to Moscow during the World War II era -- has been assailed by critics right and left, scientists and historians, American and Russian. They cite enough errors, inconsistencies and implausibilities to make a troubling case...
That the Soviets did penetrate the Los Alamos laboratory and learn many valuable secrets that hastened the development of their own atom bomb is incontrovertible. But the allegation that physicists who are still idols in the world scientific community cooperated with the espionage network? "Gumshoe braggadocio," fumes Richard Rhodes, author of a 1986 Pulitzer- prizewinning book on the making of the A-bomb. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and a fervent anticommunist, scoffs at the idea that Fermi would ever have cooperated with the Soviets, because Fermi "clearly opposed the Stalinist nightmare...
Oppenheimer, says Sudoplatov, suggested that Klaus Fuchs be included in a group of British scientists sent to Los Alamos to work with Oppenheimer's American team on developing an atom bomb. That claim was based on a report by a Soviet agent named Alexander Feklisov. But the documentary record indicates the team members were selected by British authorities. The point is of more than passing importance: Fuchs was later found to have provided the Soviets with actual drawings of the American atom bomb...
...apparent characteristics contain intriguing hints of an unexplored microcosmos, one that may be populated by particles far odder than any discovered to date. For the top quark is extraordinarily heavy. It is, to be exact, 200 times heavier than a proton and almost as hefty as an entire atom of gold. That an elementary particle can weigh so much, says University of Chicago physicist Henry Frisch, amounts to a "tantalizing clue." It suggests that the top is intricately entwined with the mysterious mechanism that is responsible for creating mass...
...year search, scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago report that they may have confirmed the existence of the sixth -- and last -- of the quarks, ghostly particles that are the smallest units of matter. Dubbed a top quark, the elusive particle weighs as much as a gold atom; it enjoyed a brief reign about a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. If the finding is confirmed, scientists will have validated three decades' worth of work that gave rise to the so-called Standard Model of particle physics...