Word: gamma
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...melodies in George Orwell's fantasy, 1984. Last week French teenagers were dancing to the catchy theme for the new Paris hit film Chronique d'un Eté, which had been dreamed up in the electronic brain of an Orwellian monster otherwise known as Binary Digital Computer Gamma Three...
Other composers and scientists have toyed with the same idea. Computers have already been put to work on music both in the U.S. and Europe. But no other mechanical composer comes close to the musical sophistication of Gamma Three...
Finally, Purcell noted several radiation hazards. The space traveller would have to be protected by several yards of lead shielding against the lethal radiation produced by interstellar particles striking his ship at 99 per cent the speed of light. The earth would have to be shielded from the tremendous gamma ray exhaust of the matter-anti-matter engine...
Most essential are your gamma ray detection instruments. To begin with, a ratemeter "is similar to a speedometer in a car except that it measures roentgens per hour rather than miles per hour." Next a dosimeter (to tell you how much you're dead)--it's comparable to an odometer except, of course, that it measures "total roentgens rather than miles...
Other physicists have toyed with the same notion, but Ward describes an actual experiment to test this theory. The Mössbauer Effect, discovery of which won German Physicist Rudolph Mössbauer a Nobel Prize (TIME, Nov. 10), allows gamma rays from certain radioactive isotopes to be used for measurements of extreme precision. Since gamma rays are closely akin to light, Physicist Ward suggests shooting them across an intense light beam and measuring any loss of energy due to photon-photon collisions...