Word: physicist
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...Sudoplatov, the Soviets received a full report on the secret experiment conducted the month before by Fermi in Chicago, in which a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was produced for the first time. But in a memo dated July 3, 1943, and reprinted in an appendix to the book, physicist Igor Kurchatov says he thinks the Americans might conduct such a successful experiment "in the near future"; he apparently did not know they had done it six months earlier. And Kurchatov was almost the last person from which that knowledge would have been kept: he headed the team of scientists...
...biographer of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, I urge strong caution in accepting without serious scrutiny Pavel Sudoplatov's account of Oppenheimer's "contributions" to Soviet nuclear weapons development ((BOOK EXCERPT, April 25)). It is a matter of historical record that Oppenheimer was interested in a variety of left-wing causes during the 1930s and early '40s and that friends and family belonged to the American Communist Party for brief periods. It is also true that the Soviets were able to penetrate the wartime Manhattan Project -- and particularly Los Alamos. Klaus Fuchs is without doubt their greatest success in that regard...
...particles far odder than any discovered to date. For the top quark is extraordinarily heavy. It is, to be exact, 200 times heavier than a proton and almost as hefty as an entire atom of gold. That an elementary particle can weigh so much, says University of Chicago physicist Henry Frisch, amounts to a "tantalizing clue." It suggests that the top is intricately entwined with the mysterious mechanism that is responsible for creating mass...
Among the CDF's most vital parts are the fast electronics that sift through torrents of incoming data, instantaneously separating the mundane from the rare. "We're looking for needles in haystacks," observes University of Michigan physicist Myron Campbell, "and to find them, we have to process a haystack every second." During the last experimental run, for instance, a trillion collisions between protons and antiprotons occurred inside CDF's big particle trap. Yet of these, only 16 million were deemed promising enough by the detector's electronic gate-keepers to be worth more detailed analysis. Further winnowing occurred as banks...
...search for the top quark taught its hunters the true meaning of the word marathon. "This has been a part of my life for so long," says Harvard University physicist John Huth, "that there's a sense of exhaustion." The time scientists once spent working with the detector is now consumed by meetings, some 20 a week.When the CDF team comes together, it is so large it must convene in the Fermilab auditorium, and the result sometimes resembles pandemonium. The 152-page paper reporting evidence for the top quark was sent off to the Physical Review two weeks...