In the process of building such intricate gadgets as radar, sonar and the proximity fuse, electronics engineers learned to measure time down to fractions as small as one millionth of a second. Last week at Brookhaven National Laboratory's nuclear science symposium, scientists agreed that one millionth is still too thick a slice of time for modern work: measurements for atomic experiments must be made a great deal faster than that.
In testing atomic weapons, the AEC often spots instruments close to the center of the blast. Information coming back from them must be recorded...