Word: fermi
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...meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Boulder, Colo., Atom-Smasher Enrico Fermi speculated on the origin of cosmic rays. The high-speed cosmic particles, packed with destructive energy and dangerous for tomorrow's rocketeers, may have wandered into the earth's galaxy from the far reaches of space, said Dr. Fermi. Geologic ages ago, they drifted into the weak, galactic magnetic field. And weak though that field is, it has had millions of years to kick the particles up to a dangerous speed. Space travelers will brave them at their peril...
...five scientists who applied for the patent had escaped from Mussolini's Italy and come to the U.S. Soon both they and their patent vanished underground. The slow neutron process was the basis of the early nuclear reactors; without it, there could have been no plutonium. Enrico Fermi saw his neutrons fire up the first reactor at Chicago...
...group of Italian scientists led by Enrico Fermi applied for a U.S. patent on a process that looked, at the time, about as impractical as a bridge of butterflies' wings. While working together in Rome, they had discovered that neutrons (themselves discovered in 1932) could be slowed down by passage through water or paraffin. Thus slowed, the neutrons were much more likely to be captured by other elements, making them radioactive. A friend of the scientists, Gabriel M. Giannini,* thought the process might have commercial value, but practically no one else did. Such great U.S. companies as Du Pont...
...patent, No. 2,206,634, was lost in the legal confusion that surrounds everything atomic. It did not pay off until last week, when the Atomic Energy Commission, after much hesitation, awarded $300,000 to the Italians and their associates. Besides Fermi, two of them, Drs. Franco Rasetti and Emilio Segre, are now atomic scientists in the U.S. The fourth, Dr. Edoardo Amaldi, is still in Rome. The fifth, Dr. Bruno Pontecorvo, will have trouble collecting his. He vanished in Finland in 1950 and is now presumably working for the Russians...
Featured will be addresses by John H. Van Vieck, Dean of the Division of Applied Science and retiring president of the Society and Nobel Prize winner Edward M. Purcell professor of Physics. In addtion, the Society's new president, Chicago University's Enrico Fermi, also a Nobel Prize winner will be installed...