Word: physicists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most laymen, Physicist Werner Heisenberg's formula denning uncertainty is as incomprehensible as an income tax instruction sheet. But to Managing Editor Alfred Friendly of the Washington Post, it's as simple as π. What it means, Friendly explained in the current Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is that "the very act of observing or probing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon." Heisenberg developed his principle while studying electrons-tiny particles with properties that change even as they are being measured. Friendly applied the principle to the coverage of some important events by reporters in "battalion...
...central laboratory, they are scintillometers set out to watch for enormously powerful cosmic rays that smack into atoms in the high atmosphere and, as a result of the crash, spray the earth's surface with millions of subatomic particles. Despite the minute size of his quarry, Physicist John Linsley of M.I.T., who operates the ray trap, reported a tremendous catch: a shower of 50 billion particles...
...primary, but not the only, impulse for emigration. British scientists and technicians are impressed by the U.S.'s more sophisticated research facilities, by its stimulating scientific atmosphere, and by the prospect of eventually reaching higher management positions than in Britain. Scientists who are tempted away, says London University Physicist G. O. Jones, are "always the most adventurous, energetic and gifted. The loss to Britain is thus far more serious than mere numbers suggest...
Heat Balance. Once Mariner was safely on its way, Physicist Pickering and his JPL teammates watched over their creation like anxious parents. There was so much that could go wrong. Materials that are well behaved in the atmosphere may be useless in space. Even some metals turn to vapor and must be used with caution. Another peril is heat. Space itself has no temperature (having no matter that can be hot or cold), but each object in space assumes a temperature that depends on the balance between the radiation that it absorbs and the radiation that it emits...
...Physicist Louis D. Kaplan of the University of Nevada and JPL, who helped design Mariner II's infra-red experiment, thinks that at ground level, Venus' atmospheric pressure may be 10 to 20 times that of Earth. Its dry, unbreathable air contains perhaps 10% carbon dioxide (v. .03% for Earth) and probably a little nitrogen. The clouds are so dense that the surface is probably dark. Radar waves bounced off Venus indicate rather uncertainly that there may be both mountains and smooth places, as on the earth...