14 lines
701 B
Plaintext
14 lines
701 B
Plaintext
barn
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n. [uncommon; prob. from the nuclear military] An unexpectedly large
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quantity of something: a unit of measurement. Why is /var/adm taking up so
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much space? The logs have grown to several barns. The source of this is
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clear: when physicists were first studying nuclear interactions, the
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probability was thought to be proportional to the cross-sectional area of
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the nucleus (this probability is still called the cross-section). Upon
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experimenting, they discovered the interactions were far more probable than
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expected; the nuclei were as big as a barn. The units for cross-sections
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were christened Barns, (10 -24 cm 2 ) and the book containing cross-sections
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has a picture of a barn on the cover.
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