Word: electronics
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What triggers the bolt, says Follin, are particles in the secondary cosmic showers called muons, which increase the charge with fresh electron avalanches. Finally, electrons burst from the cloud along a path of ionized (electrically charged) air. As other muons intercept the path at different angles, forming new trails, the electrons follow a jagged, steplike route to the ground...
Magnified 615 times with the scanning electron microscope, the body of a carpenter bee resembles a forest in a nightmare. At 13,818 times, a crack in an eggshell is a mysterious view of a devastating earthquake. In Magnifications (Schocken; 119 pages; $24.95), Photographer David Scharf takes the reader on a visual adventure into microspace. The images are beyond normal senses, but through the microscope Scharf puts the reader eyeball to eyeball with tiny insects like the Feathery Midge (in life about 2 mm. long) and allows us to make contact with beautiful, intriguing, minute parts of plants and minerals...
...density of about 1014 (100 trillion) particles per cubic centimeter. Scientists have taken two different routes in their efforts to achieve these critical conditions. One is to use a "magnetic bottle" -an enclosing magnetic field-to contain the hydrogen fuel. The other is to use lasers or electron beams to make miniature hydrogen "bombs" out of tiny pellets of the fuel...
Other groups of scientists are placing their bets on a different technique: "inertial confinement." This process involves the high-power laser or electron-beam bombardment of tiny pellets crammed with deuterium and tritium. The sudden application of the energetic beams causes instant vaporization, or boiling away, of the outer surface of the sphere. As the pellet coating flies outward, it pushes back against the deuterium and tritium, compressing and heating the mixture. If the impinging beams are energetic enough, the effect will be so great that the nuclei will fuse, releasing energy like a miniature H-bomb. Among others, researchers...
George B. Field, Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy, who also spoke at the forum, said he believed the universe might not expand forever, but might begin to fall in on itself and contract to the size of an electron...