Word: physicist
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...ordinary matter, physicists had learned, was made of four basic particles: electrons, neutrinos and two kinds of quarks. But there was another family of particles, plentiful in the early universe but now found almost exclusively in nuclear accelerators, that seemed to be divided into the same four types: the muon (a sort of heavy electron), the muon neutrino and two more quarks. And in 1976, Stanford University physicist Martin Perl announced he had found a third, even heavier electron, which he dubbed the tau--a discovery that earned him the other half of this year's physics Nobel. Perl...
Joseph Rotblat, the Polish-born physicist who quit the Manhattan Project in protest and founded a worldwide anti-nuclear movement, was awarded the 1995 Nobel Peace prize Friday morning. "I see this honor not for me personally but rather for the small group of scientists who have been working for 40 years to try to save the world, often against the world's wish," the 87-year old British activist told reporters in London. The Nobel committee also cited the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the disarmament group Rotblat helped found in 1955 as part of an effort...
...deeds of the perfidious Klaus Fuchs, the German emigre who furnished the Russians with not only a hand-drawn model of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki but also the theoretical plans for making the H-bomb. As scientist Hans Bethe remarked later, Fuchs was "the only physicist I know who truly changed history"--but he changed it by passing on nature's secrets, not discovering them...
...Soviets' test of their first atomic weapon in 1949 that galvanized Washington and U.S. scientists. Something bigger, exponentially more powerful than the atom bomb, had to be built, argued physicist Edward Teller. When Harry Truman was told of Teller's design for a hydrogen bomb, code-named Super, the President said, "What the hell are we waiting for?" The U.S. effort went into overdrive, partly because Washington suspected--rightly, as it turned out--that the Soviets were developing a Super of their...
...birth of Teller's bomb was an uneasy one. Some scientists, notably Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led Los Alamos during the war, believed that it was inherently immoral, a weapon of genocide, since its lethal footprint (unlike the A-bomb's) could not be confined to a purely military objective. He was convinced that the development of the H-bomb would only escalate the arms race. It was in fact his dedicated opposition to the Super, claims Rhodes, and not his cursory contacts with Soviet agents, that led the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953 to strip Oppenheimer...