Word: proton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Rosenfeld fed the cards into a digital computer set up to search for stars that suggested the presence of an invisible intermediate particle. Only 93 of the 2,500 stars showed the computer what it was looking for. Carefully reexamined, the stars proved that when an antiproton hits a proton, it sometimes creates five mesons-two positive pions, two negative pions and one pion with no charge at all. For a fleeting instant, one positive and one negative pion cling to the uncharged pion, forming a single unit. That unit lives for only 10²² (one ten-thousand-billion...
...team of physicists, headed by Stanford University's Dr. Robert Hofstadter, pried farther than ever into the heart of the atomic nucleus. "If our results are correct," said Hofstadter, "we found that the structure of both proton and neutron is much simpler than we expected. They appear to be two different aspects of the same entity-the nucleon. " The composition of the particles, he pointed out, is nearly alike except for the electrical charge. Each is composed of an outer cloud of moving mesons, a denser inner cloud, and an extremely dense, pointlike core. Both cores are no larger...
...eerie one?and that is part of its fascination. In the field of high-energy physics, few are involved in more eerie or more fascinating work than Berkeley's Italian-born Emilio Segrč, who discovered the antiproton, which turns into a flash of energy when it hits an ordinary proton...
...Harvard clock a thin trickle of hydrogen gas flows through an apparatus that splits its two-atom molecules into single atoms. Each of these atoms has one proton and one electron, but some of them have slightly more energy than the others because their electrons are spinning in a different way. When the atom stream shoots through a system of magnets, the low-energy atoms in it are deflected sideways while the high-energy ones converge, pass through a small hole in a 6-in. quartz bulb. The bulb is lined with paraffin which does not affect the atom...
...make a manned moon orbit in 1963. But the problems of a round trip across 480,000 miles of space are fantastic. The greatest hazard is cosmic radiation. The U.S.'s interplanetary probe, Pioneer V, reported a sinister, unpredictable enemy lurking in space: wide-ranging "storms" of deadly proton particles, spewed forth by the sun, of such energy (up to 20 billion electron volts per particle) that they will easily penetrate the thickest protective shield...