On a wintry day, my 90-year-old father was in the supermarket trying to pay for his groceries. Bundled up against the cold, his gloved hands were having trouble retrieving and counting the exact change.
The transaction evidently took too long for the man behind him in line, who muttered a curse.
Dad stopped counting, turned around, and warned, “Be quiet or I’ll write a check.”
Patrick M.S. BlackettDied 13 Jul 1974 at age 76 (born 18 Nov 1897). (Baron Blackett of Chelsea) Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett was an English physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1948 for his discoveries in the field of cosmic radiation. In these studies he used cloud-chamber photographs that revealed the way in which a stable atomic nucleus can be disintegrated by bombarding it with alpha particles (helium nuclei). Although such nuclear disintegration had been observed previously, his data explained this phenomenon for the first time and were useful in explaining disintegration by other means. |
