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periodic law

(Encyclopedia)periodic law, statement of a periodic recurrence of chemical and physical properties of the elements when the elements are arranged in order of increasing atomic number. Such an arrangement in the for...

physics

(Encyclopedia)physics, branch of science traditionally defined as the study of matter, energy, and the relation between them; it was called natural philosophy until the late 19th cent. and is still known by this na...

Richards, Theodore William

(Encyclopedia)Richards, Theodore William, 1868–1928, American chemist, b. Germantown, Pa., Ph.D. Harvard, 1888. Richards was a professor at Harvard from 1891 until his death in 1928. In 1914 he received the Nobel...

radioactivity

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Effects of a magnetic field on the products of radioactivity CE5 Disintegration series: Radioactive decay of radium-226 into lead-206 radioactivity, spontaneous disintegration or decay of t...

Alvarez, Luis Walter

(Encyclopedia)Alvarez, Luis Walter, 1911–88, American physicist, b. San Francisco, grad. Univ. of Chicago, 1932, Ph.D. 1936. He was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of a large number of r...

liquid crystal

(Encyclopedia)liquid crystal, liquid whose component particles, atoms or molecules, tend to arrange themselves with a degree of order far exceeding that found in ordinary liquids and approaching that of solid cryst...

Meyer, Julius Lothar

(Encyclopedia)Meyer, Julius Lothar, 1830–95, German chemist. He taught at Breslau, Karlsruhe, and Tübingen (from 1876) and is known especially for his work in the development of the periodic law, for which, with...

chain reaction

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Chain reaction: A neutron (n) strikes the uranium nucleus (U-235), causing it to split into fission products A and B and release two neutrons. These neutrons can in turn cause further fissions....

nuclear weapons

(Encyclopedia)nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction powered by atomic, rather than chemical, processes. Nuclear weapons produce large explosions and hazardous radioactive byproducts by means of either nuclea...

Yucca Mountain

(Encyclopedia)Yucca Mountain, mountain in the SW Nevada desert about 100 mi (161 km) northwest of Las Vegas. It is the proposed site of a Dept. of Energy (DOE) repository for up to 77,000 metric tons of nuclear was...