Word: photon
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Extra Energy. Radar waves are electromagnetic waves like light and X rays; but since their frequency is enormously smaller, they carry much less energy per "photon."* They therefore provide what scientists call an "elegant" method of dealing out very small quantities of energy. Using a formidable-looking gadget, Lamb & Retherford shot radar waves of the proper frequency through hydrogen atoms in one of Dirac's predicted states. As soon as the energy was added, the atoms turned into the other state. Since energy was required to make the change, the experiment showed that the two states did not have...
...Princeton, 15 years later, Dr. Dirac, who had forecast a particle, theorized about what happens when one particle strikes another. He selected the two simplest: the electron and the photon (unit of electromagnetic radiation, such as light). To explain how they interact, he ploughed through relativistic bafflements, covered a blackboard with lacy mathematics. Many listeners looked as if they had been hit on the head. Dirac himself seemed unsure...
...authors close their volume with a discussion of the Quantum Theory. Max Planck provided the first experiments and Einstein the early theory which regards energy as released and received not in continuous flow but in separate little bundles called quanta. A quantum of light is called a photon. Einstein used early Quantum Theory to explain photoelectric action-the ability of photons to knock electrons out of metals...
Some weeks ago George Eric MacDonnell Jauncey got a hunch that the X-particle was originally an ordinary electron whose mass had somehow been increased. He imagined what would happen if a high-energy cosmic ray photon struck an electron in the upper atmosphere. Most of the transferred energy would simply give the electron a high-velocity kick. But some of it might be converted into matter which the electron would absorb, increasing its mass. The increase might be any amount at all, depending on the initial energy of the cosmic ray and the variable quantity of matter produced...
...rays v. Cells. Using X-ray bombardments much more prolonged and severe than those employed in medicine, Dr. Hugo Fricke of the Long Island Biological Laboratory arrived at a theory of what happens when an X-ray photon (unit of radiation) is received in a living cell. The high energy carried on the photon swings the electrons of the cell up to correspondingly high energy levels which represent temperatures of 1,000,000°. This lasts for only some .00001 sec., but large protein molecules may be broken up, carbon dioxide and hydrogen given off, and water molecules...