Word: barrelfuls
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...year 2005. At the White House an agitated aide rushes into the Oval Office with grim news. "Mr. President," he announces, "OPEC has just raised its prices by another 10%, and oil will be going up to $450 a barrel by next January." To the assistant's surprise, though, the Chief Executive seems unconcerned. "Don't worry," says the President. "This time it isn't going to matter. We will have another three solar satellites on line by early next year, so we can tell those cartel characters to take their oil and [expletives deleted...
...years since, over 150 doctoral theses (in French and Japanese as well as English) have tried to explain exactly what those dozen splendidly provoking essays meant. This three-day gathering, half birthday party, half academic cracker-barrel session, has added a second question: Why do the Agrarians, with their crusty prophecies and affirmations, still sound so pertinent, half of a very non-agrarian century later...
...devices are called railguns, not because they sit atop railroad cars, like World War I artillery pieces, but because they consist of two parallel rails which act as both gunpowder and barrel. When the gun is fired, a powerful pulse of electricity goes down one rail. As the current surges to the other rail, it vaporizes a metallic fuse in back of the bullet, creating a cloud of electrically charged particles, or plasma. Simultaneously, it generates a strong magnetic field between the rails, like those in an electric motor. The field exerts a force against the plasma, just...
...presses one rail against the other, confining the magnetic field between them in an ever smaller space and imparting still greater velocity to plasma and projectile. Teams led by Physicists Ronald Hawke and Max Fowler have fired half-inch projectiles down a railgun's square-bore barrel at an estimated 10 km per sec. They believe velocities of 150 km per sec. could be reached...
That will require much more research. One problem: single-shot railguns like the Los Alamos-Livermore machine must be painstakingly rebuilt after each firing. The projectiles also have an annoying habit of breaking apart when they leave the gun barrel. But the remarkable possibilities - high-speed guns of almost every kind that can shoot through practically anything - ensure continued research, financed jointly by the Departments of Defense and Energy...