Word: richter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tribuna's report, datelined Buenos Aires, said that Dr. Ronald Richter, the former Austrian scientist, was arrested after technical experts of the Argentine army had discovered that Richter "was not sufficiently advanced as a physicist" to achieve the atomic release Perón had claimed. Three experts informed Perón that Richter, in their opinion, was nothing more than a "colossal bluff...
Best fiction: Conrad Richter, for his novel, The Town...
...point that aroused most suspicion was the mention of "temperatures of millions of degrees." The center of an exploding atomic bomb is even hotter than that, but Richter said he used no uranium, or plutonium made from uranium-the only known means of heating appreciable quantities of matter on earth to a temperature of millions of degrees. And even if that temperature were reached, it would quickly vaporize the walls of any container. So, reasoned U.S. physicists, Richter was probably mistaken on that pivotal point...
...also happens when atoms are given electrical charges and pushed to enormous velocity by cyclotrons or other "particle accelerators." So Richter may have gotten his "high temperatures" and "thermonuclear reactions" merely by the old trick of accelerating charged particles. Just after Perón's first announcement, Richter hinted that an article by British Physicist Sir John Cockcroft told what line he was following. Cockcroft described how, in 1932, he shot protons against a lithium target and turned the lithium into helium plus energy...
...other hints of Richter's suggest that he may have been working along the lines of the Cockcroft reaction. Richter remarked that he had bought a special photoelectric cell for his experiments. Such a cell would be useful for observing flashes of light given off by the lithium-helium reaction. Richter also said that he was using an Argentine material-and Argentina is a producer of lithium. The main defect in the method: only a few particles in a million prove effective, reducing the efficiency of such processes to the vanishing point. Proof by Isotope. The consensus last week...