Word: proton
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...biggest week for nuclear physics since the Smyth Report came out. Scientists of the General Electric Co.' announced that their mighty betatron, which generates 100 million-volt X rays, had shattered not only atoms but also attacked the sub-atomic particles themselves. Bombarding neutrons and protons with their powerful X ray, the G.E. men had produced mesons*-particles whose mass is partway between a proton and an electron...
Mesons disintegrate in a few millionths of a second. They had been observed before only in the debris left by the impact of a cosmic ray. Now, for the first time, they could be bred in the laboratory. What happens to the proton (or neutron) after the meson leaves it? One theory: it turns into no-one-yet-knows-what. Another theory: the X ray "condenses" into matter within the particle, and then bursts out again in the form of a meson...
From deep in the central U.S. a puckish zephyr danced northward, trailing an unseasonable perfume of spring across the central and maritime provinces. Dandelions bloomed in Hamilton. Three tulips popped up outside Fort Erie's police station; Elgin County farmers got in some early plowing; a Proton farmer tapped some maple trees, found the sap running. At Goderich the courthouse lawn had to be trimmed. Bees and mosquitoes began buzzing around Dundalk. A flock of blackbirds chirped near Truro...
...gave a new theory of their origin to the American Physical Society, meeting at the University of Chicago. They do not come from outer space as electrons: that would require a million billion electron volts. More probably the original missile from the remote regions of the universe is a proton, a bare hydrogen nucleus moving at terrific velocity with energy of 200 million electron volts. When it strikes the earth's atmosphere it breaks up either by explosion or collision and, like an earthbound skyrocket, forms a spray of smaller particles, called mesotrons. These in turn, colliding with oxygen...
...theory was supported by Chicago's Dr. Marcel Schein, who has explored the upper atmosphere by recording instruments sent up in balloons. He proposed repeating the ascensions at the equator to find out whether the mesotrons are formed merely by the explosion of the original proton or are formed from earthly atoms by collision. This would throw light on the basic question: what does it take to break up a proton-i.e., how much energy is needed to smash an atom...