Word: angelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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TWELVE SUMMERS AGO, UNIVERSITY of Arizona astronomer Roger Angel swung by a Tucson pottery shop to pick up some firebricks for a backyard kiln. Then he purchased some glass ovenware at a nearby hardware store. A few days later, he materialized in a graduate student's doorway, brandishing a couple of Pyrex custard dishes melted to a misshapen blob. "We can make telescope mirrors out of this!" Angel exclaimed. Thus began a monumental and quixotic effort to reinvent the central light-gathering surface of the telescope, from its initial design to its final polishing...
...intellectual seeds for this technological renaissance were sown more than a decade ago, when Angel and a handful of other pioneers began contemplating the challenge of building more powerful telescopes. Very quickly, they were forced to consider radical new approaches to mirror design. Simply scaling up old models would have been hopelessly expensive and unwieldy. "A large mirror can't look like a small mirror," explains Angel, "for pretty much the same reason that an elephant can't look like a fly. If it did, its legs would collapse under its own weight...
...Angel's approach relies less on intricate control systems and more on vitreous wizardry. The 10-ton mirror he and his colleagues plan to install in Arizona -- merely a warm-up for some 8-m versions -- boasts a light-collecting surface that is nearly as wide as a house is tall, yet it averages only 2.8 cm thick. What prevents this marvel from fracturing under its own weight is a supporting truss composed of thousands of glass ribs that are cast as part of the mirror's underlying structure. Arrayed in a striking hexagonal pattern, the ribs form an airy...
Although the conceptual design appears straightforward, the casting of a honeycomb mirror requires considerable technical know-how -- and time. Angel's team tackles the job in their hangar-like mirror lab located, improbably enough, under the stands of the University of Arizona football stadium. In the center of the lab is a huge round furnace. To make a mirror, a complex ceramic mold is assembled inside the furnace and filled with glittering chunks of Pyrex-type glass. Once the furnace lid is sealed, the temperature will slowly ratchet up over a period of several days, at times rising no more...
...CORONERS IN BRAZIL WHO EXAMINED THE EXhumed body of a drowning victim in 1985 were almost certain that they were looking at Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" who is said to have whistled opera while selecting which Jews would perish in the gas chambers of Auschwitz--and who performed horrifying medical experiments on many of the concentration camp's inmates. But almost was not good enough for the Israeli government, or for survivors of the camps who were still haunted by the man who escaped Allied custody and fled to South America...