Word: fermi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...keep a space vehicle (or missile) from burning up due to friction when it hits the relatively dense atmosphere of the earth at 20,000 m.p.h. To study this friction in the laboratory, Dr. Gabriel M. Giannini, a close friend of the late Atomic Physicist Enrico Fermi, is building a device called a "plasma jet." A stream of inert gas such as argon is passed through a high intensity electric discharge. The resulting heat forces a jet of highly ionized gas out a small hole at enormous speed and temperature (even a small jet will quickly chew through a steel...
...right after the Nazis were stopped at Stalingrad (Jan. 31, 1943) and the tide of battle turned, the Russians resumed atomic studies. They continued on a laboratory (but not an industrial) scale for the rest of the war. They may have heard about Enrico Fermi's achievement in Chicago (Dec. 2, 1942) of the world's first nuclear chain reaction. Espionage may have helped them. At any rate, they seem to have been convinced, long before the U.S. exploded its first atom bomb (July 16, 1945), that atomic weapons were well worth trying...
...have used neutrinos (small, uncharged particles) in their calculations. Neutrinos are necessary: without them many nuclear equations would not balance, and the massive branches of nuclear theory might fall to the ground. But no known apparatus has ever detected neutrinos. They were reasoned into existence by Nobel Prizewinners Enrico Fermi and Wolfgang Pauli to fill a theoretical need, and the gnawing suspicion has long persisted that they do not exist. Last week from the Atomic Energy Commission came big news. Neutrinos do exist...
Best hunting ground for neutrinos is near nuclear reactors, from which, by the Fermi-Pauli theory, they stream in vast numbers. So Reines and Cowan took their apparatus to the AEC's Savannah River plant. They set it up in an underground room where it was sheltered from distracting cosmic rays but exposed to a flood of neutrinos from one of the great plutonium-producing reactors...
From the Atomic Energy Commission to Hungarian-born Mathematician John Von Neumann, 52, pioneer developer of electronic brains and an AECommissioner, went a tax-free $50,000 for aiding the U.S. atomic energy program-second such award ever given (the first: to the late Nuclear Physicist Enrico Fermi...