Word: billionths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...photons to carry electromagnetic radiation. That seemed to be it. Then, after the big bomb-building breakthrough and the construction of billion-electron volt accelerators, scientists discovered a chaotic array of new particles. Some were so short-lived that their age was measured in less than a billionth of a second, their very existence inferred from the erratic tracks they left in bubble and cloud chambers. Some left no tracks at all. The list proliferated to the sound of Greek letters-eta, rho, omega, lambda, sigma, xi-until it seemed that the alphabet might...
...Bevatron, to fire negatively charged K mesons into a hydrogen bubble chamber. After the mesons collided with hydrogen nuclei, the scientists found two K mesons that were the decay products of an even more ephemeral particle. It has a life span of just 2/1 0,000th of a billionth of a billionth of a second-or just long enough to travel a few widths of an atomic nucleus at the speed of light. But its discovery carries the curious and unpredictable importance of all successful basic research. Now there is a little less strangeness in the whirligig, subatomic world...
...giant rockets designed to boost a man-carrying capsule to the moon will burn more than 2,000 tons of fuel, and a large part of their exhaust gases will be deposited more than 80 miles high, up where the air is only one-billionth as dense as at sea level. Once discharged at that altitude, the gases will not fall for weeks or months, and the air in which they will be floating is so thin that a small amount of contamination can have profound effects. Physicists Jerome Pressman, William Reidy and Winifred Tank of Geophysics Corp. of America...
Active Oil. The yellow liquid has only a faintly oily smell to human nostrils, but what it does to male cockroaches is a sight to behold. Only a bit more than one-third of a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of an ounce wafted into their cage starts them running around madly, vibrating their wings and trying to mate with each other...
...sight and shocks of a nuclear explosion in time-paring millimicro-seconds. In the recent Christmas and Johnston Island tests, 200 E.G. & G. technicians armed with $3,500,000 worth of equipment took 50,000 photographs of each of 26 explosions, shot some film at speeds of a billionth of a second. They, measured such phenomena as fireball temperatures, alpha, beta and gamma rays, eye-burn potential, and the blasts' effect on radio communication. Currently under a $25 million AEC contract, E.G. & G. is reckoning results, comparing them with earlier tests dating back to 1948, programming findings...