Word: electronics
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...month. But Lord Rutherford will never see it start. He died last week, aged 66, after failing to rally from an abdominal operation. His passing evoked expressions of grief and tribute from all over the scientific world. Said 80-year-old Sir J. J. Thomson, famed discoverer of the electron, who once was Rutherford's teacher: ''His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science...
Lately he gave the impression of having said his final say on science, because neither he nor Science knew where they were going. Renewed by the mathematical impredictability of the electron, the old war between Determinism and Free Will was again going full blast, but Sullivan could not bring himself to join those who aligned themselves cocksurely on one side or the other. He devoted himself to writing novels, lived in a small cottage in Surrey, neglected to the last to take regular medical treatment. Suffering from locomotor ataxia, he died in an advanced stage of syphilis...
...collection of atomic physics is the little thing discovered in cloud-chambers last spring by Drs. Jabez Curry Street & Edward Carl Stevenson of Harvard and by Dr. Carl David Anderson of California Institute of Technology (TIME, May 10). It does not con-form-as did the positive electron- to any mathematical predictions. Not much is known about it except that it is heavier than an electron, lighter than a proton, possessed of high penetrating power. In Denver last week Dr. Street announced that it may be positive as well as negative, that in his opinion it is not a messenger...
What got observers Street and Stevenson to thinking that a new sort of corpuscle was in the offing was that the behavior of the cosmic ray particles was not at all like the accepted manner of an electron, which characteristically forms high energy photons, which in turn form more electrons to produce the phenomena known as "electron showers." Due to these showers electrons soon lose their energy, and consequently haven't enough "push" to make much progress through lead. These newly-discovered specks, however, pass through ten centimeters of the metal almost undeviated, with little appreciable loss of energy...
...cannot be protons, since protons of the same curvature in a magnetic field produce a much thicker trail and are stopped completely at the first lead barrier, unlike the new particles, which pass through all. They cannot be neutrons (neutral particles) since they possess the same charge as the electron or the proton, although the mass is somewhere between these two. Therefore, concluded the investigators, they must be something new, and quite different...