Word: gamow
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Modern physics, proprietor of the atom, may be running out of worlds to conquer. In the current Physics Today, Physicist George Gamow explains that physics is still delving deep into mysteries, but may wind up its unfinished business as soon as it figures out the relationships between four basic values. Then, says Gamow: "We will be able to say that physical science has reached its end . . . and that all that remains is ... minor details . . . and adoration of the completed system. At that stage, physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National...
...current issue of Physics Today, Dr. George Gamow tells why he thinks that neutrinos are as real as electrons or protons. Physicists, he says, invented neutrinos because they needed something to explain why electrons, shot out of the same atomic nuclei under the same conditions, do not all have the same energy. One way to account for this discrepancy is to imagine a very small, uncharged particle that departs at the same time as the electron, carrying with it some of the energy...
Neutrinos are perhaps two-thousandths the mass of an electron, and have no electric charge by which they can be influenced electrically. They pass right through matter as if it weren't there. Physicists have calculated, says Dr. Gamow, that it would take a lead shield 200 million million miles thick to stop speeding neutrinos...
There is a theory that there are not only neutrinos but "anti-neutrinos." When the two meet, they annihilate one another. Dr. Gamow suggests, with bated breath, that neutrino-annihilation may result in the emission of "gravitational waves." In plain language, the mysterious neutrino and the waves it gives off in dying may keep everything and everybody from flying off into space...
...window shades and the books in the bookcase ["Witchery in North Dakota," TIME, April 24], but really, isn't it a bit preposterous to assume that the dictionary's molecules would coincidentally happen to go in the same di rection at the same time? Has Dr. Gamow figured the odds on such a double accident...