Word: element
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Since then, Radiation Lab scientists have gone right on adding to the table of elements. By last week they were up to No. 103. But the job is getting increasingly difficult; the newest element was so frail that it decayed almost before anyone recognized that it was around. It was manufactured, explained a lab team (Albert Ghiorso, Torbjorn Sikkeland, Almon E. Larsh and Robert M. Latimer), by coating thin nickel foil with a circular film of artificial californium (element 98) only one-tenth of an inch in diameter. Placed in a container filled with helium gas, this tiny target...
...Today, element 103 and its short-lived relatives are of interest only to theoretical physicists. They have no known practical value-but neither did plutonium when it was first manufactured at Berkeley more than 20 years...
...contrasting names of the four men who created element 103 are characteristic of U.S. science, which wears its "democracy of the intellect" mantle with a casual air and generally opens its door to everyone regardless of national, racial, religious or social background...
...Berkeley element makers-Almon Larsh, 32, and Robert Latimer, 26-are native Californians. Larsh, the son of a traveling salesman from Oklahoma, graduated from Caltech as an electrical engineer. Chemist Latimer, a Berkeley graduate, was born with a silver test tube in his mouth: his father, Wendell Latimer, was a famous chemist and head of Berke ley's department of chemistry. But the distinction brought young Robert no favors at the Radiation Lab. His own scientific skill earned him the right to handle the intricate machinery with which new elements are manufactured...
...fourth element maker, Albert Ghiorso, 45, has a Berkeley B.S. in electrical engineering, but he got into longhair physics by a back door. Son of a Vallejo, Calif, riveter, he went to work for a local electronics manufacturer and designed a successful commercial Geiger counter. While selling and servicing his product, he came in contact with the Radiation Lab, was fascinated, and got a job there. Working with top scientists, Ghiorso listened hard, and in the informal classroom he absorbed a higher education in higher physics. "I grew up with atomic energy," he says lightly...