Word: omegas
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...applied (or misapplied) physics, the ugly implications of the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing still made the splashiest news of the week. It took physicists themselves to appreciate the larger implications of a much quieter announcement: the discovery of the omega, a new subatomic particle that exists for an infinitesimal fraction of time on the strange borderline between matter and energy. The track of the evanescent omega may some day lead scientists toward a new level of physical understanding...
...have no electric charge, so it would leave no track in a cloud or bubble chamber. They were sure it would disintegrate so quickly that other signs of its brief career would be hard to find. But the theoreticians considered the undiscovered particle so important that they named it omega in advance, implying that it might be the last unknown particle left in nature's locker...
Curved Prongs. The predicted difficulty of spotting omega proved to be only too real. At least five search parties in separate laboratories reported no luck. Then, under the leadership of Yugoslav Physicist Dr. Bodgan C. Maglic, scientists at the University of California's famed Lawrence Radiation Laboratory analyzed 2,500 photographs of the four-prong stars found when antiprotons shot from Berkeley's bevatron accelerator collide with protons in a bubble chamber. Each star shows four curved lines made by negative and positive pions (pi mesons) created by the collision. There seemed to be a slight chance that...
...thousand-billion-billionth) seconds. It travels only one ten-billionth of a centimeter before it disintegrates. But in the precise world of physics, this short life is enough to get a particle classed as actual matter. The Berkeley physicists decided that their invisible particle was the long-sought omega...
...Eternal. Despite its name, omega will probably not be the last new particle to be discovered. Physicists now believe that protons may contain as many subatomic particles as the 90-odd chemical elements that were once thought to be the basic stuff of the universe. Some physicists are playing with the idea that newfound particles, such as omega, may have complicated structures of their own. Some of the experts suspect that there may never be an end of this process of peeling onionlike skins from the mystery of matter. "This means," says Professor Luis W. Alvarez, who along with...