Word: lepped
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Called the large electron-positron collider (LEP), it will smash together electrons and positrons -- "antimatter" particles that are similar to electrons except that their charge is positive rather than negative. From the debris of the collisions, which involve particles traveling at nearly the speed of light, physicists hope to get information that will solidify -- or upset -- their understanding of the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy. Says Carlo Rubbia, CERN's director general: "This is the main road in basic science. You never know where the main road is really going to take you." Agrees Steven Weinberg...
...while the unexpected is always possible, CERN physicists do have a specific quarry to start with. As soon as the LEP has been put through its paces, they will begin taking a hard look at a particle called the Z 0, which will emerge in great numbers from the electron-positron collisions. The discovery of the Z 0 and two related particles, W+ and W-, in 1982 and 1983 won a Nobel for CERN scientists Rubbia and Simon van der Meer. The three particles carry the weak nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, which is responsible...
...quest for that measurement has become a tight race between European and U.S. physicists. With the new LEP, the Europeans are confident that they can win, but they will have to hurry. A U.S. accelerator called the Stanford linear collider (SLC), built in a hurry (3 1/2 years) and on the cheap ($115 million), has been struggling since February to measure the Z 0. Despite delays in getting the machine up and running, physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, in California, have already produced 120 Z 0s. That is enough to calculate the particle's mass more accurately than...
...Spring of 1986, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett announced a change in Department funding policies, whereby local school districts were no longer obliged to provide bilingual education programs to limited English proficient (LEP) children. Instead, he said, one could substitute English as a Second Language (ESL) or immersion programs...
Significantly, no one has proved beyond doubt that LEP youngsters learn faster or better through bilingual instruction than by any other methods, including old-fashioned "submersion," i.e., going cold turkey into regular classrooms where only English is spoken. Says Adriana de Kanter, one of the authors of a controversial 1981 study sponsored by the Department of Education: "Basically we found that sometimes (bilingualism) worked, and sometimes it didn't, and that most of the time, it made no difference...