Word: atomization
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Died. Sir Joseph John ("J. J.") Thomson, 83, Master of Trinity College (Cambridge), Nobel Prizewinning (1906) physicist and author; in Cambridge, England. Small, easygoing Sir Joseph helped bridge the gap between the old & new physics by establishing the electron theory. Before his discoveries, atoms were considered indivisible; Thomson and colleagues figured out that each atom consists of a positively-charged nucleus surrounded by negatively-charged electrons...
...During World War I the late, great Lord Rutherford refused to give up his atom-splitting experiments when his help was sought on methods of submarine detection...
Einstein's relativity, which burst on the world as a mathematical vision but which has accumulated many astronomical proofs through the years, explains mass, gravity, inertia, space and time, but not atoms and electric particles, which seem to perform in a bizarre, non-relativistic world of their own. Quantum mechanics, the mathematics of the atom, has developed apart from relativity. Physicists of broad beam feel, however, that this should...
Einstein once said he expected to devote the rest of his life to the search for a unified field theory which would bridge relativity and quantum mechanics, embrace all phenomena from the atom to the universe. Once he hit on a promising lead-a treatment of space as a double sheet with atomic particles as "bridges" connecting the sheets-but that ran into a dismal dead...
Early last year news came from Germany, Denmark and France that hit physicists like a punch in the solar plexus. The massive atom of uranium, heaviest of the 92 elements, had been cracked by neutrons (electrically neutral subatomic particles), yielding some 200,000,000 electron-volts of energy per cracked atom (TIME, Feb. 6, 1939). These uranium explosions or "fissions" were most effectively touched off by slow moving neutrons of only one-thirtieth of one electron-volt energy, so that the energy profit was 6,000,000,000 to 1. Prospect of using atomic power-the old dream of sending...