Word: protons
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Kevin McLaughlin is at the pointy end of Bill Clinton's spear. Late last week Lieut. McLaughlin--his call sign is "Proton" because he once was a nuclear-reactor operator--sat in the ready room of his F-18 Hornet squadron aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz, a 95,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier steaming in the Persian Gulf. If Clinton decided it was time to punish Saddam Hussein for his defiance of United Nations inspectors, Proton would climb into his $28 million Hornet--the U.S. Navy's premier fighter-attack jet--and shower Iraq with...
...quarks occur in pairs: up and down, charm and strange and top and bottom. A proton, for example, consists of two up quarks and one down quark...
...seeming paradox, the mass of the top quark is nearly 200 times that of a proton. As a result scientists have likened this experiment to smashing together two tennis balls and finding a bowling ball in their place...
...well worth years of searching. Its apparent characteristics contain intriguing hints of an unexplored microcosmos, one that may be populated by particles far odder than any discovered to date. For the top quark is extraordinarily heavy. It is, to be exact, 200 times heavier than a proton and almost as hefty as an entire atom of gold. That an elementary particle can weigh so much, says University of Chicago physicist Henry Frisch, amounts to a "tantalizing clue." It suggests that the top is intricately entwined with the mysterious mechanism that is responsible for creating mass...
Gathering momentum as a fellow at Cambridge, Hawking calculated that the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe, must have created tiny black holes, each about the size of a proton but with the mass of a mountain. Then, upsetting the universal belief that nothing, not even light, can escape from a black hole, he used the quantum theory to demonstrate that these miniholes (and larger ones too) emit radiation. Other scientists eventually conceded that he was correct, and the black-hole emissions are now known as Hawking radiation...