The father of five children had won a toy at a raffle. He called his kids together to ask which one should have the present.
"Who is the most obedient?" he asked. "Who never talks back to Mother? Who does everything she says?"
Five small voices answered in union. "Okay, Dad. You get the toy."
Philip Hauge AbelsonBorn 27 Apr 1913; died 1 Aug 2004 at age 91. American physical chemist who proposed the gas diffusion process for separating uranium-235 from uranium-238 which was essential to the development of the atomic bomb. In collaboration with the U.S. physicist Edwin M. McMillan, he discovered a new element, later named neptunium, produced by irradiating uranium with neutrons. At the end WW II, his report on the feasibility of building a nuclear-powered submarine gave birth to the U.S. program in that field. In 1946, Abelson returned to the Carnegie Institution and pioneered in utilizing radioactive isotopes. As director of the Geophysics Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution (1953-71), he found amino acids in fossils, and fatty acids in rocks more than 1,000,000,000 years old. |
