Scientists at the Sandia Corp. in Albuquerque, where nuclear weapons are designed and assembled, have a passion for cleanliness. They have to. As weapons components are made smaller and still smaller, the presence of a single particle of dust can make larger and still larger trouble. The strictest housekeeper in all Sandia is Texas-born Physicist Willis J. Whitfield, creator of the Whitfield Ultra-Clean Room. "I thought about dust particles," he says with a slight drawl. "Where are these rascals generated? Where do they go?" Once he answered his own questions Physicist Whitfield decided that conventional industrial clean rooms are wrong in...
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