Word: electrons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Normal matter is organized into tight little worlds-atoms-with positive protons in their nuclei and negative electrons revolving around them. There is also a homeless waif, the positron (positive electron), that seems to have no place in this orderly scheme. Born in atomic catastrophes, it lives only until it hits a normal electron. Then the two "annihilate" one another, turning into gamma rays...
...headed by Professor Bruno Rossi, reported that a strange intruder from space had entered one of its cosmic-ray cloud chambers. When it first showed up, it behaved like a rather slow-moving heavy particle. Then it hit a brass plate in the apparatus and set off three powerful electron "cascades" that appeared to have been started by high-energy gamma rays...
Professor Rossi believes that the original particle may have been an antiproton that hit a normal proton in the brass plate and annihilated it. Apparently the encounter produced nothing but energy, and it produced too much (about 1.3 billion electron-volts) to be accounted for by any other process...
...save the situation, the physicists invented the neutrino, which they think of as a particle with less than one two-thousandth of the mass of an electron. It has no electric charge, and it therefore reacts very slightly with matter, sailing through solid metal or rock almost as if they were empty space. About 5% of the energy of a nuclear reactor (so says the theory) goes off in the form of neutrinos, and most of those that shoot downward pass right through the earth...
...physicists, Frederick L. Reines and Clyde Cowan Jr., gathered an erudite task force at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and went hunting neutrinos. Theory told them that if a neutrino hits a proton, as may happen on very rare occasions, the reaction should yield a neutron and a positron (positive electron). If this happens in a liquid that scintillates in the proper manner, both particles will give flashes of light...