Word: atomization
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According to this account, the Nazis may have discovered an entirely new approach to atomic explosives. Before wartime censorship blacked out all talk of atomic experiments, it was known that most scientists put their atom-smashing hopes mainly in cyclotronic bombardment of atoms with deuterons-the heavy hydrogen nuclei derived from heavy water. Individual atoms have been smashed, but in a bomb atoms must explode in quantity, each disintegrating atom setting off others. The new Nazi experiments are said to be along lines suggested by the composition of the "White Dwarf," companion of Sirius, which is the densest known star...
...speculative London report suggested that the Nazis are using the same pressure principle to crush atoms. The crusher: A "Neuman" demolition charge, which explodes inward instead of outward. Used in a sphere, the Neuman charge might develop pressures of tens of thousands of tons per square inch at the center, perhaps enough to disintegrate an unstable atom such as uranium and release its explosive atomic energy. British scientists believe that such an explosion, though not far-reaching in area, would develop unheard-of violence at the point of impact...
Eight of the last ten Nobel physics awards have gone to atomic researchers. Stern's and Rabi's awards were for studies of the atom's nucleus-the core of protons and neutrons...
Molecular Beam. Stern and Rabi tackled the question: what holds the nucleus of an atom together? Its protons have positive charges which repel each other, yet the nucleus as a whole possesses a magnetic force that keeps them from breaking loose. Nuclear magnets are so small that for a long time no one knew how to measure them. But at Hamburg, where Rabi worked with Stern as a graduate student, Stern discovered...
Rabi, carrying these studies further, found the molecular beam much more helpful in studying the structure of an atom than an atom-smashing machine, whose use he likens to studying the Taj Mahal by dynamiting it and considering the fragments. By his method, Rabi learned, for example, that the deuteron, the simplest known nucleus, revolves like a football spinning end over...