Vonnegut (was: Re: NP Shared Fates)

[Joe Varo]

Ahhh...so that's where he got the idea for _Cat's Cradle_

On Mon, 28 Apr 1997, davemarc wrote:

> [...]
> BERNARD VONNEGUT, 82, PHYSICIST WHO COAXED RAIN FROM THE SKY
> by Wolfgang Saxon
> 
> Bernard Vonnegut, a physicist and one of two researchers who first figured
> out how to wring more raindrops from cloud cover for the croplands below,
> died yesterday at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany.
> 
> The cause was cancer, said his brother, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the novelist.
> 
> [...] 
>
> Dr. Vonnegut was working at the General Electric Research Laboratory in
> Schenectady when the technique of cloud seeding took flight in the 1940's. 
> A colleague, Vincent J. Schaefer, discovered that a tiny grain of dry ice
> produced many millions of ice crystals when dropped into a cloud of water
> droplets below the freezing point.
> 
> Dr. Vonnegut soon established that silver iodide got better results in
> nucleating clouds than did dry ice.  Since then, no other nucleating
> process has been found that would rival theirs for making rain effectively.
>
> [...]