Word: electronically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Between the Atoms. In an ordinary electron tube, electrons "boil" off a heated filament into a high vacuum. There, unhampered by clogging air, they dance around obediently in response to electrical forces provided to act upon them. A transistor has no filament or vacuum, only a speck of hard germanium cut from a silvery crystal. But the mobile electrons are there, flashing through the empty channels between the ordered atoms of the crystal fragment...
...protons (positively charged nuclear particles), and whirls them around in a spiral path in a vacuum chamber 14 ft. in diameter. When they reach the outside spiral, they are moving at 140,000 miles per second (more than, seven-tenths of the speed of light), and carry 385 million electron volts of energy. At the peak of their speed and power, the protons hit a block of beryllium. Out of it sprays a swarm of "pi mesons"-elusive, still-mysterious particles first found in cosmic rays...
Meson Cloud. Physicists say that mesons are matter, but certainly they are matter of a very special kind. Pi mesons, whose mass is 276 times that of an electron, "live" on the average only three 100-millionths of a second. Then they change into lighter "mu mesons" (210 electron masses), which live somewhat longer, eventually decaying into ordinary electrons. The mass that mesons lose in these transformations turns principally into energy, a striking example of Einstein's principle: that mass is equivalent to energy...
Behind the line-covered viewing screen is a "grid" of fine parallel wires, one wire for each group of phosphor lines. At the narrow rear end of the tube is a single electron gun that shoots a slender beam of electrons through the wire grid at the viewing screen. As in all television tubes, the electron beam scans at a rapid rate, painting an ever-changing picture on the screen of phosphors...
...Electron Switching. The trick in color television is to make the electrons that represent red, for example, hit the phosphor that glows in red. In the Lawrence tube, the wire grid does this switching job. It is hooked up, through the proper electronic apparatus, to the signal that comes over the air. When the signal tells it that certain electrons represent red, the wires of the grid are charged with enough electrical potential to focus the electron beam onto a line of red phosphor. When "green" electrons come along, it switches them to green phosphor, etc. So, jumping from phosphor...