Word: tomiyasu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Blue Puff. Physicist Kiyo Tomiyasu, 42, technical director of General Electric Co.'s laser lab, is particularly proud of the ease with which one of his lasers has drilled holes in a pea-sized black synthetic diamond. Diamonds, which are the hard est things known to man, have been drilled before, but the process is difficult and time consuming. Dr. Tomiyasu (Nevada-born; Harvard doctorate) did the job on his diamond with laser light. Each hole was drilled by a flash that lasted only one two-thousandth of a second. Pinpointed by a lens on the crystallized carbon...
...Tomiyasu and his colleagues have also learned how to make laser light carry information. Modulated in much the same manner as radio waves, its high frequencies can handle far more intelligence than any microwave beam. Each five-thousandth-of-a-second burst of light can theoretically be made to transmit coded information that would be the equivalent of 200,000 words...
...most purposes there are handier ways to communicate, but Dr. Tomiyasu has his eye on a notoriously difficult communication problem. When a missile nose cone or a spaceship slams down through the atmosphere, it surrounds itself with a sheath of plasma (hot, ionized gases) that repels radio waves. Space scientists well remember that during the most critical period of Colonel John Glenn's return to earth from his orbital flight, the radios of his Mercury capsule were blacked out for seven minutes by the plasma sheath. Laser light, if strong enough, can penetrate plasma, and Dr. Tomiyasu believes that...
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