Word: physicist
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Despite the persecution, newcomers have joined the Moscow, Ukrainian and Lithuanian Watch Groups even as their founding members were sent to prison. The founder of the Helsinki movement, Physicist Yuri Orlov, 55, is now serving seven years in a concentration camp; nonetheless, he managed to smuggle out an appeal to the Madrid conference, asking the participating countries to press for the release of Soviet political prisoners. Sovietologists estimate that there are about 10,000 such prisoners. One of the most active organizations monitoring human rights is the recently formed Prison Camp Watch Group, which has members in three different concentration...
...morale of Soviet dissidents has not yet recovered from the forcible exile from Moscow last January of their undisputed leader, Physicist Andrei Sakharov. The Nobel Peace prizewinner is being held incommunicado, under tight surveillance, in the provincial city of Gorky. Since Sakharov's banishment, a number of groups he supported have been crippled. For example, the KGB has arrested the three leading members of the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, a group that publicized the Soviet practice of confining dissidents in police-run mental hospitals...
Revival of serious interest in railguns began a few years ago, when Physicist-Engineer Richard Marshall and his colleagues at the Australian National University in Canberra updated the old concept with some notable innovations, including the plasma-creating fuse. They also increased the gun's muzzle velocity by resorting to an unusual power source: a huge homopolar electric generator which uses two rapidly spinning flywheels to build up and store electricity. In bare ly a second the Canberra homopolar de livered as many as 500 megajoules of direct current - enough to light up a small city. Such a quick...
...some scientists think that railguns, firing a stream of high-velocity particles at a target of deuterium and tritium, may offer the best way yet of achieving controlled fusion, a key energy hope for the future. Perhaps the most far-reaching application involves the space colonization ideas of Princeton Physicist Gerard O'Neill. He and some colleagues at M.I.T. are already building models of kindred electromagnetic launchers that they believe could be assembled on the moon and used to propel tons of lunar ores into space for construction of solar-powered space habitats...
DIED. John Van Vleck, 81, physicist regarded as the "father of modern magnetism"; in Cambridge, Mass. Van Vleck was the first to indicate the significance of "electron correlation," or the interaction between the motions of electrons; and his 1932 book, The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities, remains a classic in the field. His research, for which he was a co-recipient of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics, helped explain how a foreign atom invades the symmetrical structure of a crystal, and was basic to the development of modern computer memory systems...