This guy was sitting in his attorney's office. "Do you want the bad news first or the terrible news?" the lawyer said.
"Give me the bad news first."
"Your wife found a picture worth a half-million dollars."
"That's the bad news?" asked the man incredulously. "I can't wait to hear the terrible news."
"The terrible news is that it's of you and your secretary."
Atom splitIn 1932, the atom was split by a proton beam on a lithium target. Two physicists, Englishman Sir John Douglas Cockcroft and Irishman Errnest Walton had developed the first nuclear particle accelerator (the Cockcroft-Walton generator for which they shared 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics. The accelerator was built in a disused room in the Cavendish Laboratory. With this equipment, Walton succeeded in being the first to split the atom (its nucleus). When a proton from the beam supplied by the accelerator struck a lithium nucleus, their unstable combination disintegrated into two alpha particles (helim nuclei). Walton observed the scintillations characteristic of alpha particles on a zinc sulphide screen.« |
