Word: method
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...current Scientific Monthly, Dr. John F. Allen of St. Andrews University, Scotland, tells how they are going about it. The common method of creating cold-compressing and expanding gases-works only as far down as about one degree above absolute zero. So the scientists turned to a cold-creating method based on the fact that atoms in certain crystalline salts act like little magnets...
...when the crystals are placed in a strong magnetic field, they line up in one direction. The lining-up process warms the crystals slightly. Then the magnetic field is removed. The atom-magnets point at random again, and the crystals get colder than they were at the start. This method works fine down to about two-thousandths of one degree above absolute zero...
...this point the scientists use the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. When certain materials (e.g., lithium fluoride) are placed in a strong magnetic field, the nuclei of their atoms also line up. When the magnetism is removed, the lithium fluoride gets colder. This method promises to yield a temperature only one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero...
Most spectators, including Princess Elizabeth, got their biggest chuckles from Rube Goldbergish efforts like W. Heath Robinson's Magnetic Method of Stretching Spaghetti (at the expense of Britain's face-lengthening austerity program) and H. M. Bateman's Tragedy at Wellington Barracks, a study in horror-struck faces as a butter-fingered guardsman on parade drops his rifle. It was dapper Australian-born Cartoonist Bateman who had started the whole thing in a speech to the Royal Society last February, declaring it was high time the British had a "National Academy of Humorous Art." Last week...
U.C.L.A. rashly called the West test "the first rapid and accurate method" of determining whether cancer treatment is having any effect...