Word: electronic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...transmutation of elements with an 85-ton magnet. Now they have a 225-ton machine for applying the radioactivity of their cracked atoms (and the neutrons which cause it) to biological and medicinal research. This giant hurls tiny bullets with record-breaking energies of more than 30,000,000 electron-volts...
...hardheaded physicists, the idea of releasing and harnessing this energy was a wild dream. Then, early in 1939, Hahn and Strassmann of Germany, with help from France, Sweden and Denmark, used neutrons to break uranium atoms into two nearly equal fragments, with release of some 200,000,000 electron-volts of atomic energy per atom (TIME, Feb. 6; March 13). This was by far the most violent atomic explosion ever effected by human agency...
Heavy atoms like uranium had been chipped before, but not cracked in two. Moreover, the most effective agents for splitting or "fission" of uranium were "slow" neutrons with initial energies of only a fraction of one electron-volt, so that the energy profit from one fission was enormous...
...carbon must be the stuff that enables the sun to turn fragments of hydrogen atoms into sunshine (TIME, Feb. 27). Lately he has been working on the function in the atom's nucleus of a particle called the "mesotron," which weighs about 200 times as much as an electron, about one-ninth as much as a proton or a neutron. His findings, completed last week, will shortly be published in Physical Review...
...Carl David Anderson of Caltech announced the existence of an intermediate particle, apparently created about ten miles up in the air by cosmic ray impacts, and its existence was also vouched for by Street & Stevenson of Harvard. The particle was variously called the "X-particle," the "heavy electron"' (a misnomer, since it was not an electron), the "barytron" (also a misnomer, because it means "heavy particle," whereas the particle is lighter than a proton). A name meaning "intermediate particle" was clearly in order, and so practically all U. S. physicists now call it the "mesotron" or "meson...