Word: electronics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This portion of the book accounts for the most puzzling disproportion in Disturbing the Universe. Freeman Dyson is a proven scientific commodity. Robert Oppenheimer hailed his successful synthesis of two seemingly irreconcilable but equally correct theories of the electron as one of the century's breakthroughs. Now the Alfred P. Sloan foundation has asked him to contribute his bit to "the public understanding of the scientific enterprise...
...vicinity of Jupiter that is 300 million to 400 million degrees centigrade. Later, Voyager II, going almost 45,000 m.p.h., came as close as 404,000 miles to Jupiter's cloud tops on its way to Uranus-some 1.6 billion miles out there. 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...
...Chinese have also turned en masse to advanced technology. They are struggling to improve their electronics industry, and are producing computers of the 1960s type. At the Shanghai Institute of Metallurgy we saw several impressive "clean rooms" under construction for the fabrication of "chips" containing the microscopic circuitry that is the brain of the modern computer. Some of these chips are being manufactured with new electron-beam techniques. Scientists are also experimenting with lasers. One intriguing project: a six-beam experimental laser device to produce power from thermonuclear fusion. Blessed with an abundance of the elements called rare earths...
...Chinese are also exploring more esoteric realms. In Peking American-educated veterans of China's nuclear weapons program told of their plans to build by the mid-1980s a 50 billion-electron-volt accelerator for research in particle physics. Scientists are building two gravity-wave detectors, one in Peking, the other at Canton's Sun Yat-sen University...
...catch quarks in that playful activity, four separate teams of experimenters-involving 300 scientists from eight countries, including the U.S.-turned to West Germany's new PETRA colliding beam accelerator in Hamburg. The powerful machine accelerates electrons to energies of 15 billion electron volts and sends them barreling head-on into their antimatter opposites, particles called positrons, coming at high speed from the opposite direction. In the past, when such experiments have been tried with other accelerators operating at lower energies, the debris from the electron-positron collisions has consisted of only two "jets," or streams, of hadrons...