Word: physicist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...offer with Skocpol, he added, "Her husband lives in Princeton, and she has said in the past one of the prime forces moving her career decisions was to move close to Princeton. I would think it [the offer] would be attractive." William Skocpol, the sociologist's husband, is a physicist at Bell Labs near Princeton...
...group, under the direction of University of Houston Physicist Paul C.W. Chu, had achieved the phenomenon of superconductivity at a higher temperature than ever before. And the National Science Foundation announced last week that Chu's Houston lab had pushed that temperature 5 degrees higher -- to 98 K. Under such conditions -- far less extreme than those required only a few years ago -- superconducting technology might eventually become inexpensive and even commonplace. Possible applications: superconducting cables that could transmit electricity from a power plant to a distant city with essentially no energy loss; practical versions of trains that "fly" ) just above...
Superconductivity was discovered in 1911, when Dutch Physicist Heike Onnes cooled the element mercury to near absolute zero (0 Kelvin, or -460 degrees F) and discovered that it had lost its resistance to electric current. Since then more than two dozen chemical elements and hundreds of compounds have been found to be superconductors near that temperature extreme. The only practical way to make something that cold is to bathe it in liquid helium, which exists only at temperatures below 4 K. But helium is rare, and expensive to liquefy. Even so, the efficiency of electromagnets wound with superconducting wires...
...that would become a superconductor at less extreme temperatures -- particularly above 77 K (-320 degrees F), the point at which nitrogen gas liquefies. Reason: nitrogen is a common gas and costs no more than a tenth as much in liquid form as helium. In fact, says Iowa State University Physicist Douglas Finnemore, liquid nitrogen, priced as low as a nickel a liter, is a "heck of a lot cheaper than beer...
...foresees a balmy 120 K within a few months, and does not rule out superconductors that could operate at 300 K (room temperature). University of Illinois Physicist John Bardeen, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1972 for his part in explaining the quantum-mechanical basis of superconductivity, agrees that there is no theoretical reason precluding higher temperature superconductors. But, he says, "finding materials with the right combination of properties is tricky." Admits Chu: "There was a bit of serendipity involved...