Word: meson
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...University of California admitted last week (after too many garbled rumors in the press) that it had created the first man-made meson. U.C. did it with its 4,000-ton cyclotron. The news caused a sizable flurry throughout the world of physics-for mesons are closely connected with the unknown force that holds matter together...
...Mesons are mysterious, short-lived particles knocked out of .atomic nuclei. It takes a lot of punch to knock them out. Before the 4,000-ton cyclotron developed sufficient punch, the only mesons in captivity had been trapped in the wild. Dr. Carl Anderson of CalTech found their characteristic tracks in a cloud chamber. Other scientists found two types, heavy and light, in photographic plates exposed on high mountains. All had been formed by cosmic rays, the enormously powerful particles that strike down out of space. No man-pushed particle was strong enough to engender a single meson...
...other extreme of physics-the infinitesimally small end-there was also baffling news. Last week, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, ex-head of the Los Alamos (atom bomb) Laboratory, postulated a new sub-atomic particle: the neutral meson, which leads an even more feverishly active life than the positive and negative meson which scientists already know about. In its normal habitat within an atomic nucleus, it "lives" only one hundredth of a sextillionth (1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th) of a second. The neutral meson's brief life, remarked Professor Oppenheimer, may be the reason no physicist...
Tracked to the Grave. The two Russians studied microscopic tracks of free silver which mesons had made on photographic films (probably exposed at high altitudes, where cosmic ray effects are strongest). Their authorized, translated report is far from clear, but apparently they found what they were looking for in the sensitive emulsion: groups of short lines arranged like a star or a chicken-track. Each of these, they said, was an X which marked the spot where a negative meson had murdered an atomic nucleus...
When a negative meson hit a nucleus, they theorized, its mass turned into energy. The added energy made the nucleus break into smaller particles, which flew apart and traced the chicken-track lines...