Word: protons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...decay within the atomic nucleus. In carrying their work further to relate these two forces to a third -the strong force (which binds the atomic nucleus together)-they and other researchers determined that such unity requires a net loss of baryons when certain particles collide. In other words, the proton must decay into lighter subatomic fragments. By most physicists' reckonings, protons have a mean life of around 10,000 billion billion billion (10³-²) years (more than half of them will disintegrate in that time). Thus out of 10³-² protons, only one is likely to decay...
...carry a nuclear warhead designed at the Lab. Theoreticians and physicists specializing in thermodynamics are drilling holes into nearby sites to reach "hot rocks" that will provide geothermal power. A special reverence is held for LAMPF, the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. There, one of the most powerful linear proton accelerators in existence is using a particle called a pion to treat certain cancers. Because of the technique's pinpoint accuracy, it is a possible substitute for dreaded cobalt and X-ray therapy...
...Science now has an electron microscope that can magnify 20 million times and so can photograph a particle with a diameter of about 4 billionths of an inch. Computers can do 80 million calculations a second (and ostensibly 6.9 trillion a day). Other recent news: a suspicion that the proton, a basic natural building block, may be unstable. It may indeed be decaying at such a rate that it would peter out in a million billion billion billion years. The effect of that notion is finally not mathematical but purely poetic...
...that some black holes must have been created during the birth of the universe, in the cataclysmic explosion called the Big Bang. These black holes, as opposed to those formed later by the collapse of stars, are minuscule; their event horizons are no larger than the circumference of a proton or other atomic particle. Subsequently, he found that they seemed to be radiating energy. That was such a startling break with the accepted concept of black holes that Hawking at first doubted his results. But no one has yet uncovered flaws in his elaborate mathematics. Indeed, many theorists believe that...
Gell-Mann's theory, modified so that each quark also comes in three different "colors" (no kidding), proved tremendouly successful. One could then describe every hadron by some quark combination, and every quark combination by an observed hadron. (A proton, for instance, is the combination 'uud.' The neutral K-meson, which has strangeness *1, is the combination...