Eloquent Bubbles -- Radioactive Earth -- Geological Clock

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FEBRUARY 1955
BUBBLE CHAMBER--"In their exploration of the submicroscopic world of atomic nuclei, physicists are like men groping in a dark cave with a flashlight. It would help if they had a better flashlight. Physical chemists have long known that in a clean, smooth-walled vessel a very pure liquid may be heated above its usual boiling point without boiling. I wondered whether a flying particle might, under suitable conditions, trigger the formation of the microscopic bubbles that start the boiling process. If so, it might make a visible track in superheated liquid.--Donald A. Glaser" [Editors' note: Glaser won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the bubble chamber.]

FLUORIDATION FIGHT--"Many people, particularly scientists, believe that we are suffering in the U.S. from a national epidemic of irrationality--what Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas has called the 'swinish blight of anti-intellectualism.' Fluoridation of public water supplies has been recommended by an impressive list of scientific organizations. However, from the beginning there has been opposition. The anti-fluoridation argument has three main themes: 1. fluoridation is an experiment which has not proved its value and may hold unknown dangers; 2. fluorides are poisons; 3. treatment by public agencies of the water that everyone must drink is a step in the direction of socialized medicine and an invasion of individual rights."

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