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Died. Sir George Paget Thomson, 83, British physicist and chairman of the wartime committee that confirmed the feasibility of building an atomic bomb; in Cambridge, England. Thomson's father, Sir Joseph, discovered the electron in 1897 and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906; 31 years later, Sir George shared the same prize for his work on the wavelike movement of electrons. After the war, Sir George became a strong advocate of international atomic energy control...
...generated by moving magnetic fields. But they could not solve one puzzle. Complete symmetry between electricity and magnetism meant that there must be a monopole-a basic magnetic particle of one pole, either north or south. It would, in effect, be the equivalent of the positive proton or negative electron that exists independently in nature. But all magnetized objects, from subatomic particles to giant electromagnets, seemed to have inseparable north and south poles. Broken into the tiniest segments, each piece remained a "dipole." No isolated north or south monopole could be found...
...with the newly developed tool of quantum mechanics. His calculations showed that there should indeed be a magnetic particle (or family of particles) that carries a basic magnetic charge-either north or south. That charge, said Dirac, would be 68.5 times as strong as the charge on an electron. Or it would be some multiple of 68.5-say, 137. Scientists had good reason to respect Dirac's reasoning. He had earlier predicted the existence of a positron, or positively charged counterpart of the electron. The positron was subsequently discovered during cosmic-ray experiments in 1932, but the monopole proved...
According to an early theory, the strain may have been caused when the mild Hog Flu virus, which sickened hogs but not humans, combined with a relatively harmless bacillus to produce a virulent man killer. But in 1918, 25 years before the electron microscope made it possible to see viruses at all, there was no way to discourage advances from the Spanish Lady. Paranoia often took the place of ineffective remedies. There were those who thought the bug was the Kaiser's secret weapon, despite the losses his own troops suffered. In Poland, the source of infection was said...
Tentatively called a "J" particle by Ting's team, which used the 33 billion-electron-volt accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and a "Psi" particle by Richter's group at the two-mile-long Stanford Linear Accelerator, it was the heaviest atomic fragment ever found-almost 3% times more massive than the proton. It was also, by nuclear standards, extremely long-lived. It survived a full one-hundred billionths of one-billionth of a second, or 1,000 times longer than other massive particles...