Word: bevatron
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...Charter Hill above Berkeley, Calif, a strange and monstrous machine, the AEC's bevatron,* was slowly coming to life last week. Housed in a circular building 75 feet high is a steel doughnut 135 feet in diameter and weighing 10,000 tons. This is the world's greatest magnet, energized by current flowing through 26.5 miles of copper cable two inches thick. When its current was first turned on, a crashing clatter shook the bevatron building as iron objects on the floor rearranged themselves violently to fit the invisible pattern of its magnetic field...
...University of California scientists who designed and built the bevatron are gradually stepping up its energy, starting only small groups of protons around the magnetic race track, but already their energy at the end of their run is 4.7 billion electron-volts. This is twice the energy of the second largest accelerator, the cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island. It is the energy of middle sized cosmic-ray particles, which have been accelerated, perhaps for billions of years, by unknown forces in space. Each proton at the end of its journey has a mass six times as great...
Shields Needed. When the bevatron is finally operating at its design energy, 6.25 bev, 20 swarms of 100 million protons each will burst from its chamber every minute. No one knows exactly how dangerous they will be. The scientists are gingerly observing the first small pulses to see how they should place their thick concrete shields...
...ancestors of the bevatron, accelerators with less than a thousandth of its power, extracted from nature the information that told man how to build uranium and hydrogen bombs. The bevatron will strike far deeper into the atomic nucleus, where matter and energy lie closely twined together...