Word: proton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Theoretical physicists have insisted for years that anti-protons-protons with a negative electrical charge-would eventually be found. But their theories also told them that antiprotons, though stable in a vacuum, cannot exist in contact with ordinary matter. As soon as one of them encounters a normal proton, both it and the proton it hits will vanish in a flash of energy. This makes antiprotons hard to find in nature, which is loaded with ordinary protons lying in wait to destroy them. It is like searching for living insects in a bottle...
...they created antiprotons artificially and kept them alive long enough to identify them. Drs. Owen Chamberlain, Emilio Segre, Clyde Wiegand and Thomas Ypsilantis worked with Berkeley's Bevatron, a particle accelerator that was built by the Atomic Energy Commission for just such jobs. It can shoot a proton so fast that it carries 6.2 Bev. (billion electron volts) of energy. Physicists had figured that when a proton of this power hits a neutron, it will create a new proton and an antiproton. In such "pair formation," about two Bev. of energy is turned into matter. This is the reverse...
...discovery of the anti-proton, announced Tuesday, is an achievement "of immense importance that opens up new vistas about the structure of the universe," he said. Rabi explained that it is physically possible for two forms of matter to exist: ordinary and anti-matter...
Contact between the two forms of matter would lead to annihilation of both with the release of enormous amounts of energy, he added. It was possible to discover the anti-proton only when large amounts of energy were produced in the University of California's new bevatron, he said...
Previous theory hypothesized the existence of "symmetry of charge" in the universe; that is, for each charged particle and oppositely charged particle exists. The discovery of the anti-proton supports this belief. With this new particle, "the picture is complete," Rabi observed...