Word: mesotron
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...Bethe was hailed by astrophysicists for figuring out that carbon must be the stuff that enables the sun to turn fragments of hydrogen atoms into sunshine (TIME, Feb. 27). Lately he has been working on the function in the atom's nucleus of a particle called the "mesotron," which weighs about 200 times as much as an electron, about one-ninth as much as a proton or a neutron. His findings, completed last week, will shortly be published in Physical Review...
...heavy electron"' (a misnomer, since it was not an electron), the "barytron" (also a misnomer, because it means "heavy particle," whereas the particle is lighter than a proton). A name meaning "intermediate particle" was clearly in order, and so practically all U. S. physicists now call it the "mesotron" or "meson...
...binding force that holds atomic nuclei together (and hence keeps the universe from exploding into a monstrous, formless cloud of atomic dust) is a powerful attraction between protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus. Dr. Bethe finds that the transmitter of this force is none other than the mesotron, which seems not to be a permanent part of the nucleus but to appear and disappear as needed. In other words, when a nuclear proton wants to transfer a package of energy to another proton or to a neutron, it calls into existence a mesotron, which does the job and then...
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