Word: physicists
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...book: Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom (Macmillan; $2). Its author: famed, Russian-born Physicist George Gamow, of George Washington University. In a whimsical explanation of the behavior of atoms, Dr. Gamow discusses the mathematical odds against just such an occurrence as was reported in the Wild Plum School...
Theoretically, although the odds are trillions of trillions to one, such spontaneous activity is possible. The notion was first suggested by the late great Physicist James Clerk Maxwell, and physicists speak of it as "Maxwell's Demon." It is based on a fundamental law of thermodynamics known as "the principle of increasing entropy" (i.e., disorder...
...normal state of matter, according to this law, molecules move in an erratic manner, bumping against other molecules and constantly increasing the disorder. This results in a more or less even distribution of energy (i.e., heat) throughout an object. But it is conceivable, explains Physicist Gamow, that a group of molecules might accidentally arrange themselves in an orderly movement that would upset this normal condition. Thus all the air molecules in a room might collect under a table, leaving the rest of the room a vacuum. Or (a somewhat less unlikely possibility) a group of molecules might fall into...
...France Libre, blitz-born champion of French resistance. Contents: literary appreciations of the French underground; elegant patter on a Paris midinette's chic triumph over her ersatz clothes; letters of Marcel Proust; essays on Vichy doubletalk, wartime Paris, Painter Pierre Bonnard. Editor: André Labarthe, brilliant ex-physicist, intellectual foe of Vichy, onetime friend of Charles de Gaulle, former Giraud minister, now an OWIer...
...Eyes. In radar, OSRD has carried on somewhat like the airplane designers who picked up where the Wright brothers left off. Credit for discovery of the 20-year-old radar principle is in dispute between two U.S. Navy researchers, A. Hoyt Taylor and Leo C. Young, and a Scottish physicist, Sir Robert A. Watson-Watt. The British were the first to use radar (which they call the radio locator) in the Battle of Britain. But OSRD has converted the first crude radar into something of almost human intelligence and with superhuman powers...