Word: electronic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Early last year news came from Germany, Denmark and France that hit physicists like a punch in the solar plexus. The massive atom of uranium, heaviest of the 92 elements, had been cracked by neutrons (electrically neutral subatomic particles), yielding some 200,000,000 electron-volts of energy per cracked atom (TIME, Feb. 6, 1939). These uranium explosions or "fissions" were most effectively touched off by slow moving neutrons of only one-thirtieth of one electron-volt energy, so that the energy profit was 6,000,000,000 to 1. Prospect of using atomic power-the old dream of sending...
Overt purpose of the book is to examine the findings of modern science for light on the domain commonly accepted as beyond science. Quantum Mechanics (mathematics of the atom) finds that a subatomic particle, e. g., an electron, is accompanied by immaterial waves of energy which seem to guide it. Indeed it is only by analysis of its "pilot wave" that the speed and position of an electron can be determined, and then only probably, not certainly. Immaterial waves need not be tangled up with matter at all. Like radio waves, they can exist in or travel through nothingness...
Take something immensely more complex than an electron: a living cell. When the cell is "ready" to divide, the centrosome separates and moves to opposite sides, the chromosomes line up in the middle and then split evenly; then some thing nips in the sides of the cell to a wasp-waisted constriction, and finally the cell divides into two healthy duplicates of its original self. Biologists have the devil's own time trying to explain this mysterious, well-drilled maneuver. In Strömberg's view, it is initiated and controlled by an "immaterial wave of organization." Though...
...some time Dr. Lawrence has been dreaming, talking and planning a cyclotron of several thousand tons, which would yield projectile energies of more than 100,000,000 electron-volts. For safety, it would be housed in a vast laboratory buried in a hillside. Last week his plans for a 4,000-ton machine were all ready. The Rockefeller Foundation made its vitalizing gift contingent on the university's raising another $250,000; but it seemed certain the university would...
...Lawrence Olin Brockway, 32, of the University of Michigan: the A.C.S. prize of $1,000 given each year to a chemist under 35 who shows unusual promise in research; for charting, by means of electron diffraction, the structures of more than 100 organic and inorganic compounds...