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...them all over the place. Newest and most powerful of the smashers is Columbia University's cyclotron at Nevis, an estate at Irvington-on-Hudson that once belonged to James (son of Alexander) Hamilton. The 2,500-ton monster generates a beam of protons with 380 million electron volts of energy. Such voltage is too powerful for mere atom-smashing, which is considered scientific child's play nowadays. The Nevis machine was designed for probing deeper secrets of matter...
...reaction discussed by the author uses deuterium (heavy hydrogen) packed into a layer around the uranium detonator. Deuterium atoms, which are given the comparatively low energy of 100,000 electron volts, says the article, will react with each other on collision, turning into helium 3 and a single free neutron. The products fly apart, with a speed equivalent to 3.3 million electron volts...
...very destructive. It might be much better, says the author, to surround the uranium detonator with lithium hydride. When hydrogen and lithium atoms in this common chemical compound are given sufficient energy, they react with one another, forming two atoms of helium 4. It takes only 100,000 electron volts, says the article, to start the reaction. Each atomic collision yields an enormous amount of energy: 17.3 million electron volts. Thus lithium hydride should give more than twice as much energy per pound as fissioning uranium...
...lens focuses the scene being viewed on the front side of the photoconductor. A slender beam of electrons from an "electron gun" scans the rear side of the photo-conductor. When the electrons hit a brightly lighted area, a lot of them pass through. When they hit dark parts, only a few of them pass through. The transparent conducting layer collects the escaping electrons and passes them on in the form of a "video" current whose rapid fluctuations represent the light and shade of the picture. An ordinary television set turns the current into a copy of the scene which...
Kerst is also the betatron's christener. At first he thought of calling it the "Ausserordentlichhochges chwindigkeit-electronenentwickelndesschwerab eitsbei-gollitron," German for "extraordinarily high-speed electron generator, hard work by golly-tron." He settled for "Betatron," from beta particle (high-speed electron...