Word: electronics
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Research on the atom has attracted some of the most brilliant minds of contemporary science, and atomic history is strewn with the names of Nobel Prizewinners. Aged Sir J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron, is a Nobelman; so is Niels Bohr of Denmark and so was the late Lord Rutherford of England, who formulated atomic structure. Their atom was, and still is, a nucleus surrounded by electrons. But in the 1920's, with the powerful searchlight of relativity illuminating the atomic field, it became apparent that the picture of the electron as a simple particle of negative electricity...
...month. But Lord Rutherford will never see it start. He died last week, aged 66, after failing to rally from an abdominal operation. His passing evoked expressions of grief and tribute from all over the scientific world. Said 80-year-old Sir J. J. Thomson, famed discoverer of the electron, who once was Rutherford's teacher: ''His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science...
...sized electrodes until the potential is such that a mighty flow of direct current crosses the gap. For technical reasons, notably the difficulty of constructing a discharge tube which will handle the flow of high-voltage particles, the practical upper limit for these types is about 2,000,000 electron-volts. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which had a giant electrostatic generator shooting 7,000,000-volt sparks from electrode to electrode four years ago, has not yet put it to work smashing atoms because of the discharge tube problem...
...circle at higher speed. After another half-circle the reversed voltage hits them again, and so on. The deuterons go spiraling outward, faster and faster, toward the rim of the tank. After being kicked 100 times by 50,000 volts, they attain speeds of 5,000,000 electron-volts. As they approach the rim of the tank, they are guided by a deflecting plate through a window and thence against any target the researchers choose...
Lately he gave the impression of having said his final say on science, because neither he nor Science knew where they were going. Renewed by the mathematical impredictability of the electron, the old war between Determinism and Free Will was again going full blast, but Sullivan could not bring himself to join those who aligned themselves cocksurely on one side or the other. He devoted himself to writing novels, lived in a small cottage in Surrey, neglected to the last to take regular medical treatment. Suffering from locomotor ataxia, he died in an advanced stage of syphilis...