Word: cyclotron
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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University physicists pumped 99.999999 percent of the air out of their cyclotron in a vacuum test last week, and then announced that the machine would be finished some time next term...
...vacuum--ton one-billionths of an atmosphere--is one of the highest ever made in a a large container. Oil diffusion pumps produced it in the cyclotron's main chamber...
With the vacuum equipment out of the way, the main job now is building and attaching the oscillator to the cyclotron. As the protons spin around, the oscillator boosts their speed each time they pass. These successive boosts often result in velocities greater than 10,000 miles per second...
This figure (6 BEV) has a thrilling, musical ring to the ears of nuclear physicists. The 184-inch cyclotron at Berkeley generates only about 350 MEV (million electron volts). With this comparatively puny force, it creates mesons, the mysterious particles knocked out of matter by cosmic rays from space. The new cyclotron will give its protons so much energy that they will act like the "primary" cosmic rays themselves, which slam through the earth's atmosphere and plunge deep into the ground. These wild invaders from space have never before been caged in laboratories. No one can guess what...
...mystery of physics is: what keeps matter from flying apart-and what, indeed, differentiates matter from energy? When science can answer these questions, it may be able to turn any kind of matter, at will, into its energy equivalent. But the new cyclotron, powerful though it be, may not guide man at once to this topmost fruit on Science's Tree of Knowledge...