Word: physicist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Suddenly, at 93 Kelvin (-292 degrees F), the resistance dropped precipitously. The substance had become a superconductor, able to transmit current with virtually no loss of energy. "We were so excited and so nervous that our hands were shaking," says Physicist Maw-kuen Wu. "At first we were suspicious that it was an error...
...said Physicist Andrei Sakharov, perhaps the Soviet Union's most famous human-rights advocate, in assessing last week's announcement by the Kremlin that it had begun to release as many as 280 political dissidents from prisons and other places of detention. At best this would represent no more than 40% of the 750 or more Soviet citizens who are currently imprisoned or detained for their political beliefs. Still, it is the first mass release of prisoners of conscience since the de-Stalinization drive of the late 1950s, as well as the latest and perhaps most important manifestation of Soviet...
Events in Moscow last week seemed like scenes from a world turned upside down. Dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov, who recently returned from seven years of internal exile, was invited to a nuclear disarmament conference at the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Soviet police arrested Yuri Churbanov, the son-in-law of former Leader Leonid Brezhnev, and jailed him on bribery and corruption charges. In addition, officials freed more than 40 political prisoners, the largest dissident group to be released in three decades, and announced that some 500 people, most of them Jews, have been granted exit visas. Only 900 people were allowed...
...leading contenders were Rubbia and his colleagues, who had built a $20 million particle detector called UA1 to be used with the SPS accelerator, and a second team of physicists at CERN using a detector known as UA2. Rubbia drove the UA1 team unmercifully, Taubes writes, then unofficially spread the news of a discovery before performing the sort of rigorous analysis that would confirm it. This maneuver would effectively pre-empt any claim by the UA2 group, which was proceeding with a more careful proof before going public. Says Physicist Bernard Sadoulet, a member of the UA1 team...
Rubbia's triumph, says Taubes, did not change his tactics. In 1984 the physicist announced evidence that seemed to suggest two more discoveries. The first was that of the top quark, a basic building block of matter that is predicted by theory but that other scientists believe still remains undiscovered. In the second, his team's experiments picked up the signs of what would become known as monojets; Rubbia boldly theorized that the monojets might signal a hitherto undetected particle. If so, Rubbia would have his second Nobel-class discovery within two years. A discovery of this importance...