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THE CHANDRA X-RAY TELESCOPE is now installed in its highly elliptical orbit, where the Earth itself, and not just its atmosphere, will not interfere with x-ray reception. Named for astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekher, the 14-m-long telescope is considered one of NASA’s three “great observatories”; the other telescopes in this battleship class are the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Chandra will have superb angular resolution (half an arc-second, 8 times better than previous x-ray telescopes), sensitivity to faint objects (20 times better), and spectral resolution (1 eV). The object of the mission is unflinchingly to explore graphic violence wherever it can be found at x-ray wavelengths: quasars, black holes, pulsars, supernovas, and intergalactic plasmas.

BLOCH STATES: NOT FOR ELECTRONS ONLY. It is often essential to consider an electron traveling through a solid as being a wave that spreads out through the whole of the solid. The quantum description of this spread-out electron was formulated by Felix Bloch in the 1920s. Physicists have since sought to extend this idea of a “Bloch state” to guest atoms in a crystal, but an atom’s mass is so large (and its equivalent wavelength so small) that a Bloch state for an atom has been difficult to observe. Now, physicists from Japan have seen clear signs of a Bloch state for a muonium “atom”, in effect a light isotope of hydrogen whose proton is replaced by a positively charged muon particle having 1/9 of the proton’s mass. Performing experiments at the Rutherford Appleton lab in England, the researchers studied spin-polarized muonium (Mu) atoms in a KCI crystal cooled down to 10 mK. Measuring how long it took the atoms to lose their initial polarization in the presence of an external magnetic field provided information on their energy state and matched the predictions of a Bloch model. Further studies may offer new insights into the energy bands of atoms in crystals.

PARTICLE ACCELERATOR TURN-ONS. The concrete poured and the magnets tuned, several important new machines are about to take up important physics matters. The Main Injector at Fermilab, dedicated in June, is an additional 2-mile racecourse for getting protons up to speed in much greater numbers. What this means is that the proton-antiproton collider run starting in 2000 will record in one year as much data as was taken in the earlier 10-year era. This is crucial since beam intensity is no less important than the energy of collision when producing rare objects, such as supersymmetric particles (hypothetical cousins of the known leptons and quarks) and the much sought Higgs boson (playing a sort of midwife role in the life of many other particles, the Higgs should also exist in its own right). New theoretical estimates for the mass of the Higgs suggest that Fermilab might just have enough energy to discover the Higgs (Science, 25 June). Meanwhile, two accelerator schemes dedicated to studying CP violation through the agency of B-meson decays, are nearly ready. The Assymetric B Factory at SLAC in California is now smashing 9-GeV electrons into 3.1-GeV positrons to produce pairs of Bs. The decay products are absorbed in a detector called BaBar. A comparable setup at the KEK lab in Japan will soon collide 8-GeV electrons with 3.5-GeV positrons inside a detector called BELLE. By the way, the cost of these detectors is a not-inconsiderable portion of the accelerators themselves. BaBar and BELLE cost, respectively $80 million and $70 million (Physics World, May 1999). Finally, at the DAFNE electron-positron collider in Frascati, Italy, CP violation is also the subject matter, but the approach is different. Here the collisions are dedicated to making phi mesons, which then decay into a pair of K mesons, which in turn break up (amid the KLOE detector) in a process that violates charge-parity in variance (CERN Courier, June 1999.)

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International Herald Tribune

24 November, 1999

Russians Scoff at Missile Defenses

They Cite Several Ways to Neutralize Any ‘Star Wars’ System

By David Hoffman Washington Post Service

MOSCOW – When the United States raises the prospect that it will build a missile defense system, Russian strategic planners do not have far to go for a response.

They can reach for a drawer marked “Star Wars” and take out some of the Soviet era blueprints drawn up more than 15 years ago in response to President Ronald Reagan’s grand hopes for the Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile defense shield.

There, gathering dust until recently, are some choice ideas and gadgets that the Soviet designers thought could be used to confuse, evade, saturate and overwhelm a missile defense system.

Mr. Reagan never realized his vision of a global shield against ballistic missiles, and the Soviet ideas were mostly laid to rest, in some cases by subsequent arms control treaties. But in recent weeks, Russia’s top military strategists have begun to trot them out again, and they are openly promising to reanimate these schemes if necessary to frustrate an American missile defense system.

These include the use of decoy warheads, space-based “chaff” to simulate warheads, maneuverable warheads to steer away from interceptor rockets and prolonging the deployment of huge land-based, multiple-warhead missiles.

The Clinton administration has said it will not decide until June whether to go ahead with a limited missile defense, requiring changes in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russia, which opposes treaty modifications, has already ratcheted up a noisy campaign against changes, saying they would destroy all arms control efforts of the last 20 years and wreck such cooperative efforts as reciprocal inspections.

The result has been a back-to-the future scenario in which Russia is reviving gambits planned in the Soviet era to fend off a missile defense system like that proposed in 1983 by the Reagan administration.

An anti-missile system uses a combination of detectors like radar and satellites to spot incoming missiles and warheads and then destroy fast-flying interceptor rockets to try to destroy them before they land or explode. At the center of the old Soviet ideas now being refloated is to defeat the missile defense system by fooling it.

The pride of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces is the relatively new Topol-M, a solid-fuel missile, now carrying a single warhead, which was designed to replace older, multiple-warhead missiles being retired under arms control treaties.

Russia put a regiment of 10 Topol-M missiles on duty last year, and is expected to deploy a second regiment by the end of next month.

But Russian officials have said they could convert the Topol-M into a three-warhead missile. Such multiple-warhead land-based missiles were outlawed by the START-2 treaty, which has never been ratified by the Russian Parliament and may not be. Moreover, Russians have said the START-1 treaty could also be endangered.

“If this anti-missile treaty crashes, then there are no problems to increase the launched weight of the rockets,” Major General Vladimir Dvorkin, director of the Defense Ministry’s Central Research Institute and a leading strategist, said in a recent newspaper essay.

The added launch weight is to accommodate additional war-heads or other equipment to defeat an anti-missile system. Russian specialists said the Topol-M could carry at least three and perhaps as many as six warheads.

Yuri Solomonov, director of the Moscow institute that designed the Topol-M, said earlier this year that it could “penetrate any country’s anti-missile system.”

Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada, and a top Russian arms control expert, said that Russia had numerous ways to try to defeat an anti-missile system with such “penetration aids” as decoy warheads.

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Hungry Birds

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Two robins were sitting in a tree.

- “I’m really hungry”, said the first one.

- “Me, too” said the second. “Let’s fly down and find some lunch.”

They flew to the ground and found a nice plot of plowed ground full of worms. They ate and ate and ate and ate ‘til they could eat no more.

- “I’m so full I don’t think I can fly back up to the tree”, said the first one.

- “Me either. Let’s just lay here and bask in the warm sun”, said the second.

- “O.K.” said the first.

They plopped down, basking in the sun.

No sooner than they had fallen asleep, a big fat tomcat snuck up a gobbled them up. As he sat washing his face after his meal, he thought.

- “I love baskin’ robins.”

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Hiram answers the telephone, and it’s an emergency room doctor.

The doctor says, “Your wife was in a serious car accident, and I have bad news and good news. The bad news is she has lost all use of both arms and both legs, and will be on a respirator the rest of her life.”

Hiram says, “My God. What’s the good news?”

The doctor says, “I’m kidding. She’s dead.”

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The kindergarten class had settled down to its coloring books.

Willie came up to the teacher’s desk and said, “Miss Francis, I ain’t go no crayons.”

“Willie,” Miss Francis said, “you mean, “I don’t have any crayons. You don’t have any crayons. We don’t have any crayons. They don’t have any crayons. Do you see what. I’m getting at?”

“Not really,” Willie said, “What happened to all them crayons?”

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On the first day of school, a first grader handed his teacher a note from his mother. The note read, “The opinions expressed by this child are not necessarily those of his parents.”

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A sixth grade class is doing some spelling drills. The teacher asks Tommy if he can spell ‘before’. He stands up and says, “Before, B-E-P-H-O-R.”

The teacher says, “No, that’s wrong. Can anyone else spell before?”

Another little boy stands up and says, “Before, B-E-F-O-O-R.”

Again the teacher says, “No, that’s wrong.” The teacher asks,

“Little Johnny, can you spell ‘before’?”

Little Johnny stands up and says, “Before, B-E-F-O-R-E.”

“Excellent Johnny, now can you use it in a sentence?”

Little Johnny says, “That’s easy. Two plus two be fore.”

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On doctor’s orders, Melling had moved to Arizona. Two weeks later, he was dead. His body was shipped back home, where the undertaker prepared it for the services.

Melling’s brother came in to make sure everything was taken care of. “Would you like to see the body?” the undertaker asked.

“I might as well take a look at it before the others get here.”

The undertaker led him into the next room and opened the top half of the casket. He stood back and proudly displayed his work.

“He looks good,” the brother said. “Those two weeks in Arizona were just the thing for him.”

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While the US stock market is at an all time high, the ups and downs frighten a lot of small investors like me. I went to my financial advisor at the bank and ask if he were worried.

He replied that he slept like a baby. I was amazed and asked, “Really??? Even with all the fluctuations?”

He said, “Yes I sleep for a couple of hours, then wake up and cry for a couple of hours.”