Word: hydrogen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from all normal social contacts and followed at all times by a bodyguard. A theoretical physicist ranking with America's J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, he was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After he helped develop the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, he became one of the country's most decorated men. But he remained unknown because his honors were bestowed in secret. In those years, Sakharov believed he had a useful function: "When I began working on this terrible weapon, I felt subjectively that I was working...
...beginning of 1968, I felt a growing compulsion to speak out. I was influenced by my life experience and a feeling of personal responsibility, reinforced by the part I'd played in the development of the hydrogen bomb, the special knowledge I'd gained about thermonuclear warfare, my bitter struggle to ban nuclear testing and my familiarity with the Soviet system. My reading and discussions with a fellow scientist had acquainted me with the notions of an open society, convergence and world government. I hoped that these notions might ease the tragic crisis of our age. In 1968 I took...
Sakharov was a top Soviet physicist and helped developed its hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, but became a dissident leader in the 1970s...
Tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that contains two neutrons and a proton in its nucleus, occurs naturally in minute quantities in raindrops and groundwater. But the radioactive gas took on strategic importance in 1952, when the U.S. exploded its first hydrogen bomb. That explosion demonstrated the destructive force that can be released when tritium fuses with deuterium, another hydrogen isotope, to yield helium and a burst of nuclear energy. Today, tritium is used both to enhance the power of atom bombs and in the trigger mechanism of the far more destructive H-bomb. Because it decays at the rate...
...Pons and Fleischmann claimed that their device--in which electricity was sent through a jar of heavy water and a palladium electrode at room temperature--produced additional heat, which could only occur if the heavy hydrogen atoms in the water fused together...