Occult Chemistry ~3 75
Orthodox physicists, unable without siddhi vision to see inside
atoms, could pursue Rutherford's method only by bombarding atomic
nuclei with atomic particles in a determined effort to break up a nu-
cleus and find what it contained. Their best projectiles were electrons
and protons, the former easily obtained by heating up a wire to incan-
descence, the latter by removing an electron from an atom of com-
mercially available hydrogen. Either particle could then be sufficiently
speeded up with an accelerator to shatter a targeted nucleus.
Man-made accelerators are designed to propel particles around a
circuit to increase their energy and mass. In principle, all one needs is
a standard car battery with terminals connected to copper plates a
short distance apart in a vacuum.An electron from the negative termi-
nal will invariably jump the gap toward the positive terminal, gather-
ing energy as it jumps. If the positive terminal is made of wire screen,
most of the electrons slip through to create a beam of electrons. Repeat
the process along a several-mile circuit, add a million-volt battery (plus
magnets to keep the electron beam from wandering off its steeplechase
track), and you can accelerate electrons to an energy of several million
volts.These can then create an impact strong enough to smash the nu-
cleus of the atom into which they collide.
Physicists analyze the debris, not directly, as did the theosophists,
but by means of a black box in which the scatterings are parsed by so-
phisticated electronic equipment. More and more expensive colliders
were built in the 1950s and '60s, including Stanford's Linear Accel-
erator Center, known as SLAC, and Europe's Center for Nuclear
Research, known as CERN, and Fermilab outside Chicago, named after
the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, developer of that super-
incubus, the atom bomb. From these multimillion dollar collider~ is-
sued man-made particles by the thousands, nlostly infinitesimal
ephemeral particles that disappeared in microseconds-as little as a bil-
lionth of a trillionth-though a couple of hundred heavier particles re-
mained substantial long enough to be called hadrons (from Greek for
heavy) and were given Greek-letter names such as sigma and lambda.
Many of these, being synthetic varieties of protons and neutrons, were
not much use in determining the basic substance of matter: whereas a
natural proton ca; last virtually forever, atom-smashed hadrons vanish