Word: meson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week Columbia University told about its meson beams, a powerful new tool that the physicists are using to explore the atom's sub-basement of mystery. Columbia's monster cyclotron starts with protons (positively charged nuclear particles), and whirls them around in a spiral path in a vacuum chamber 14 ft. in diameter. When they reach the outside spiral, they are moving at 140,000 miles per second (more than, seven-tenths of the speed of light), and carry 385 million electron volts of energy. At the peak of their speed and power, the protons...
...Meson Cloud. Physicists say that mesons are matter, but certainly they are matter of a very special kind. Pi mesons, whose mass is 276 times that of an electron, "live" on the average only three 100-millionths of a second. Then they change into lighter "mu mesons" (210 electron masses), which live somewhat longer, eventually decaying into ordinary electrons. The mass that mesons lose in these transformations turns principally into energy, a striking example of Einstein's principle: that mass is equivalent to energy...
...large part of physical research now centers on mesons. Physicists believe that they are the "glue" that holds atoms together. According to the best-established theory, the nucleons (protons and neutrons that form the nuclei of atoms) have some sort of core surrounded by a cloud of rapidly moving mesons. Each shares its meson cloud with neighboring nucleons. If it were not for this sharing of mesons, the physicists believe, most atoms would fly apart, their protons repelling one another with enormous force...
...lungs. He spent most of his time in Vallejo Community Hospital, often under an oxygen tent. Even when feeling his best, he was forbidden by the doctors to lift his newborn daughter Claire, now two years old. But he kept a microscope near his bed and worked on his meson research whenever he had enough strength. During his final hours under an oxygen tent, knowing that death would no longer be denied, he worked with pencil and notebook, painfully gleaning his brain while he still had time for last bits of knowledge to pass along to the living. Last week...
...scientist's brain was as good as ever. In 1948 he became nationally known as co-discoverer (with Dr. Giulio Lattes) of the man-made meson, a basic atomic particle produced by the 184-inch cyclotron at the University of California (TIME, March 15, 1948). About the same time his disease was finally diagnosed correctly as berylliosis (beryllium poisoning...