Word: trillionth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What interests physicists, though, is not just what the Z 0 does but how long it lives before decaying. The precise length of its life, which is less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, will reveal how many sorts of particles the Z 0 decays into and thus how many other particles exist. Current theory says there may be only one fundamental particle of matter, called the top quark, left to observe. But there may be many more, and gauging the Z 0's lifetime will tell physicists how close they are to a full understanding...
...handle it all. The pace is so fast now, I sometimes feel like a gunfighter dodging bullets." In business especially, the world financial markets almost never close, so why should the heavy little eyes of an ambitious baby banker? "There is now a new supercomputer that operates at a trillionth of a second," says Robert Schrank, a management consultant in New York City. "What's a trillionth of a second? Time is being eaten up by all these new inventions. Even leisure is done on schedule. Golfing is done on schedule. My son is on the run all the time...
...late 1950s Herschbach proposed to study what happens to individual molecules in the trillionth of a second of a chemical reaction by using the crossed molecular beam technique. Colleagues thought he was crazy, but this novel approach proved to be useful -- especially in the following years, when Lee made improvements that substantially increased the variety of reactions that could be studied this way. The method is analogous to that of particle physicists, who accelerate beams of speeding subatomic particles, smash them together or into a target, and then study the resulting debris. Herschbach's and Lee's beams consist...
...crossed the molecular beams in a vacuum, which agitated the molecules. They then used mathematical and experimental methods to determine the velocity and energy content of the resulting reactions, which take place in less then a trillionth of a second...
...begun to glimpse an underlying oneness in the four basic forces. With their customary whimsy, they call these theories GUTs (for Grand Unified Theories). Central to this framework is the existence of new particles, tiny fragments of matter (or energy, since the two are interchangeable) less than a trillionth the size of a bacterium, itself only about a ten-thousandth of an inch long, that transmit these forces...