Word: physicists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...about the nature of matter gets the better of him. Democritus conceived matter as only a whirl of tiny, indivisible units called atoms. Plato disagreed, saw it as a symmetrical expression of mathematical relations between five basic structures. Then came the theory of light radiating in continuous waves. German Physicist Max Planck overturned that in 1900; he said energy comes in discontinuous particles-or quanta-and Einstein followed him with the idea that light can be thought of as both particle and wave...
Last week two impressive efforts toward the definitive statement of harmony were announced. In West Berlin, before a meeting of scientists that honored the late Max Planck's 100th birth date, German Physicist Werner Heisenberg, 56, reported that he is prepared to make "a suggestion for the basic equation of matter." In Manhattan, before a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences, German-born Dr. John Grebe, 58, director of Dow Chemical Co.'s nuclear, research, proposed "a periodic table for fundamental particles" that might help "explain the material of the universe...
...nuclear-weapons tests if there should be a U.S.-U.S.S.R. agreement on inspection. The battleground: Democrat Hubert Humphrey's Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Disarmament. The principal contenders: on one side. H-bomb Pioneer Edward Teller and Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss; on the other, Columbia University Physicist Jay Orear and the President's new disarmament adviser, Hans Bethe...
Recently, the President's new science adviser, James Rhyne Killian Jr. of M.I.T., appointed Hans Bethe, Cornell physicist, to head up a new presidential study on disarmament. Bethe and Teller had clashed in 1949 and early 1950 on the feasibility of making a hydrogen bomb-Teller for, Bethe against. They had clashed over the security suspension of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer when Teller testified for the AEC and Bethe for Oppenheimer. Now Teller and Bethe were the poles of groups contending for the President's ear on an issue that might make a cold-war turning point...
Anti-Gravity. Another long-range problem is to find out whether antiparticles have antigravity. Some theorists think that they do. repelling ordinary matter instead of attracting it in the normal way. Physicist Segrè thinks this unlikely, but he says that the question of anti-gravity cannot be answered conclusively without an actual experiment. One way would be to isolate anti-neutrons and observe whether they rise in the earth's gravitational field instead of falling as neutrons do. This experiment looks difficult, and Dr. Segrè fears that it may not be accomplished for another generation...