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50, 100 & 150 Years Ago: Little Neutral Particle, Britain's Achilles' Heel and Pickpockets Beware

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AUGUST 1956
NEUTRINO FOUND--"A long and exciting adventure in physics has come to a triumphant end. The neutrino has been found. Frederick Reines and Clyde L. Cowan, Jr., of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory trapped the ghostly particle in an underground chamber near the Savannah River atomic pile. Phillip Morrison, in the January issue of Scientific American, compared the neutrino to the planet Neptune. The discovery of Neptune was a crowning achievement of classical physics: the motions of other planets showed it had to be there. The neutrino is a similar achievement of modern physics, and its discovery is a vindication of the law of the conservation of energy."

AUGUST 1906
JAVA DEAD END--"Some years ago Eug¿ne Dubois discovered in the island of Java some bones from a prehistoric animal, which might have formed the so-called missing link in the chain of descent of man from monkey. Julius Kollman is rather of the opinion that the direct antecedents of man should not be sought among the species of anthropoid apes of great height and with flat skulls, but much further back in the zoological scale, among the small monkeys with pointed skulls; from these he believes were developed the human pygmy races of prehistoric ages, with pointed skulls. Thus may be explained the persistency with which mythology and folk lore allude to pygmy people."

Scientific American Magazine Vol 295 Issue 2This article was published with the title “Little Neutral Particle -- Britain's Achilles' Heel -- Pickpockets Beware” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 295 No. 2 ()
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican082006-3j67wNC9NqoNRCQh80QpMm

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