Secrets of the Universe

To a public harassed by headlines, atom-age scientists sometimes seem little more than laboratory soldiers. H-bombs and missiles explode out of their abstruse equations; the products of their most esoteric research are used to refine the practical arts of war. But last week in Washington, D.C. some 2,200 members of the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Sciences met at their spring meetings and read paper after paper to prove that they are still engaged in their principal job, prying into the secrets of the universe:

P: Nobel Laureate Harold Clayton Urey* proposed a bold new theory that accounts for the formation of the universe and suggests that the moon may be at least 100 million years older than the earth. In the beginning, said Urey. the explosion of a supernova some 5 billion years ago splattered the space around it with cooling cosmic dust. As particles of matter caromed into each other and stuck, moon-sized bodies were formed. These, too, collided with each other and grew into planets. Somehow, the clump of material that men now know as the moon escaped collision and floated free, only to be captured ages later by the younger earth's gravitational field. Far out in space, said Urey, other planets may be forming in much the same manner around other suns.

P:Dr. Richard F. Post, of the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, reported that a "magnetic mirror" machine, playfully called Toy Top III, may soon make possible a controlled (nonexplosive) thermonuclear reaction. In the past, plasma formed by magnetic squeezing and heating of heavy hydrogen was too unstable to reach and maintain the high temperature necessary for a thermonuclear reaction. By using only two of Toy Top's three stages, said Post, plasma was confined in a "magnetic bottle" for one-thousandth of a second at a temperature of 40 million degrees centigrade. Post hopes that by using the Top's three stages, he can double the temperature and keep the plasma confined for five-thousandths of a second, thus duplicating in his laboratory the thermonuclear reaction of the sun.

P: A supercool atom smasher, operating at temperatures close to absolute zero (--460DEG F.), may be smaller and cheaper to build, and could operate on far less electrical power than conventional electromagnetic accelerators, said Midwestern Universities Research Association Physicist Dr. Cyril D. Curtis. By using such superconductive materials as niobium-tin alloy (TIME, March 3) instead of huge iron magnets, atom smashers now 1,200 ft. in diameter might be reduced to less than 550 ft., and construction and operation costs could be cut by 35%. Curtis' projection was underscored at the same A.P.S. session when Brookhaven National Laboratory's Dr. G. Kenneth Green proudly reported that the world's biggest atom smasher, the Brookhaven alternating gradient synchrotron, was now in full-scale operation. Costing $31 million, the synchrotron can generate up to 33 or 34 billion electron volts (BEV) by boosting protons through an underground circular metal tube at fantastic speeds.

P: A six-man team of physicists, headed by Stanford University's Dr. Robert Hofstadter, pried farther than ever into the heart of the atomic nucleus. "If our results are correct," said Hofstadter, "we found that the structure of both proton and neutron is much simpler than we expected. They appear to be two different aspects of the same entity--the nucleon. " The composition of the particles, he pointed out, is nearly alike except for the electrical charge. Each is composed of an outer cloud of moving mesons, a denser inner cloud, and an extremely dense, pointlike core. Both cores are no larger than .00000000000002 cm. Both the clouds and core of the proton are positively charged, while the charge in a neutron is electrically balanced by its inner cloud (negative) and its outer cloud and core (positive). Target for future examination: the heart of the matter, the minute, tightly packed center of the proton. "And so it goes," sighed Hofstadter, "forever."

* Whose 1931 prizewinning discovery, deuterium (heavy hydrogen), became a vital component of the hydrogen bomb.

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