Word: electronized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...outer shell of its atom, germanium has four electrons. If the crystal were absolutely pure germanium, each of these electrons would be bound by a neighboring atom. But if an occasional atom of an impurity such as phosphorus, which has five outer electrons, is built into the crystal, one of its electrons is not bound, and so is free to move around. If the impurity is an element with only three outer electrons, there is a "hole" into which electrons from germanium can move under certain conditions. Every time an electron moves into one hole, a new hole is left...
Points & Junctions. Some transistors (the "point contact" type) use only one kind of germanium with fine metal points pressing upon it. "Junction transistors" use both the germanium that has free electrons and germanium that has "holes." Both transistors act like electron tubes; they can turn alternating into direct current, amplify faint currents, generate musical tones, serve as relays; they even perform brilliantly as photoelectric cells, turning light into electricity...
...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...