Word: physicist
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Died. John Ray Dunning, 67, pioneering American nuclear physicist; of a heart attack; in Key Biscayne, Fla. Dunning directed the 1939 experiment at Columbia University's cyclotron in Manhattan that confirmed the findings of scientists in Germany and elsewhere about the possibility of controlled atomic fission. "Believe we have observed new phenomenon of far-reaching consequences," he scrawled in a diary. Dunning's later research showed that Uranium 235 was the most fissionable isotope, a discovery that led to the gas-diffusion method of refining U-235, currently used in nuclear bombs and most atomic power plants...
Magnetic Puzzle. At the very least, proof of the existence of the monopole would solve a mystery that has baffled scientists for more than a century. The elegant equations that Scottish Physicist James Clerk Maxwell worked out in 1865 described in detail the symmetrical relationship between electricity and magnetism. They accounted, for example, for the magnetic field formed by every electric current, and they predicted the electric currents that can be generated by moving magnetic fields. But they could not solve one puzzle. Complete symmetry between electricity and magnetism meant that there must be a monopole-a basic magnetic particle...
...British Physicist Paul A.M. Dirac attacked this dilemma in 1931 with the newly developed tool of quantum mechanics. His calculations showed that there should indeed be a magnetic particle (or family of particles) that carries a basic magnetic charge-either north or south. That charge, said Dirac, would be 68.5 times as strong as the charge on an electron. Or it would be some multiple of 68.5-say, 137. Scientists had good reason to respect Dirac's reasoning. He had earlier predicted the existence of a positron, or positively charged counterpart of the electron. The positron was subsequently discovered...
Ever since the Kremlin exiled Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the West 17 months ago, Russia's leading resident political dissenter has been Andrei Sakharov. A world-renowned nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the development of the U.S.S.R.'s hydrogen bomb, Sakharov, during the past decade, has emerged as a leader of the human rights movement within the Soviet Union...
...published in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf later this year. In his introduction, Sakharov describes this new book as an updating of his widely publicized 1968 manifesto, Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, in which he called for rapprochement between the Communist and capitalist systems. The physicist writes that he decided to undertake the new project largely as a result of a discussion about détente in his Moscow apartment last November with New York's Conservative Senator James Buckley ("the first U.S. Government figure who considered it possible to meet with me"). In sending...