Word: joliot
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Paris last year the Curie-Joliots bombarded a piece of lithium with alpha particles, produced neutrons and boron atoms. The scientific world at that time was engrossed with neutrons whose existence Cambridge University atomic physicists had just discovered (TIME, March 7, 1932). The significance of the boron atoms in the Curie-Joliot experiment attracted less attention until last week Dr. Kenneth T. Bainbridge, who weighs atoms at Bartol Research Foundation laboratories in Swarthmore, Pa., presented an interpretation...
...lithium atom has an atomic weight of almost seven (reasoned Dr. Bainbridge in effect). An alpha particle has an atomic weight which may be called four. If they merged during the Curie-Joliot bombardment, their combined weight was almost eleven. If the alpha particle and lithium atom did merge, they at once split into a boron atom and a neutron, whose combined weights totaled infinitesimally more than the combined weights of the lithium atom and alpha particle...
Among those who have been bombarding atoms with alpha particles are Mme Curie's daughter, Irene Curie-Joliot, her husband F. Joliot, Dr. Chadwick and Professor Walter Bothe of Giessen, Germany. Professor Bothe, bombarding beryllium, decided he was creating an artificial super-gamma ray. Dr. Chadwick decided that a proton and an electron knocked loose by alpha particles might combine, without any electrical charge at all, in one unit to make a neutron. This self-contained unit might be the ultimate unit of magnetism, having within itself opposite poles...
...that penetrates lead more easily than paraffin. By empirical reasoning, the ray produced must be a new kind of ray, since it breaks all known rules. The Curies concluded their ray "cannot be of an electronic or electromagnetic nature." It is probably a ray of neutrons. Irene Curie-Joliot and her husband did much of the preliminary work in radiation that helped Neutron-Discoverer Chadwick. Mme Curie-Joliot, 35, looks faintly like Actor John Barrymore...