Word: proton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Professor Rossi believes that the original particle may have been an antiproton that hit a normal proton in the brass plate and annihilated it. Apparently the encounter produced nothing but energy, and it produced too much (about 1.3 billion electron-volts) to be accounted for by any other process...
Flashing Particles. Fortified with this knowledge, two Atomic Energy Commission physicists, Frederick L. Reines and Clyde Cowan Jr., gathered an erudite task force at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and went hunting neutrinos. Theory told them that if a neutrino hits a proton, as may happen on very rare occasions, the reaction should yield a neutron and a positron (positive electron). If this happens in a liquid that scintillates in the proper manner, both particles will give flashes of light...
...Times to the Moon. The protons keep together like a swarm of bees, and each time they circle the track, they get a boost of electrical energy that increases their speed. Round and round they go, 4,000,000 times in 1.85 seconds. After they have traveled 300,000 miles (1.25 times the distance to the moon), they are moving at almost the speed of light, and each proton carries an explosive cargo of energy...
...University of California scientists who designed and built the bevatron are gradually stepping up its energy, starting only small groups of protons around the magnetic race track, but already their energy at the end of their run is 4.7 billion electron-volts. This is twice the energy of the second largest accelerator, the cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island. It is the energy of middle sized cosmic-ray particles, which have been accelerated, perhaps for billions of years, by unknown forces in space. Each proton at the end of its journey has a mass six times as great...
There is good reason to believe that proton projectiles of much greater energy will be needed before the mystery of the nucleus can be cleared up. At present only the primary cosmic rays (which have to be sought by rockets or balloons) can supply such energies, but the new accelerator will shoot beams of "primaries" right into the scientists' instruments...