Word: bells
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sweet Laments. The astonishing thing about all the hoopla is that Sills has been singing virtually in the Met's shadow all her life. As a seven-year-old named Belle Silverman in Brooklyn, she learned to imitate all her mother's records of the legendary diva Amelita Galli-Curci, and by nine she was singing arias like Caro nome and The Bell Song in a Manhattan radio studio on the Major Bowes Capitol Family Hour...
...summer of 1967, Jocelyn Bell, a graduate student at Cambridge University's Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, discovered that a radio telescope she was monitoring had picked up some curious signals from space. She called the beat-like pulses to the attention of Astronomer Antony Hewish, the senior scientist. Hewish's team at first suspected them to be signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. But further inquiry proved that pulsars, as the signal sources were named, were actually long-sought neutron stars, small and incredibly dense collapsed stars. So significant was the discovery to the understanding of stellar evolution that...
...became embroiled in a bitter controversy. At a press conference at Montreal's McGill University, Britain's Sir Fred Hoyle, a noted astronomer, theoretician, science fiction writer (The Black Cloud) and scientific gadfly, had charged that Hewish "pinched" the prize for himself by failing to give Jocelyn Bell proper credit. Asked by a reporter if he considered it a scientific injustice to leave Bell out of the award, Hoyle replied: "Yes, I think it was a scientific scandal of major proportions...
Angry Retort. In Cambridge, Hewish angrily retorted that Bell's name had been associated with the discovery from the start and labeled Hoyle's charge "untrue" and "ridiculous." An expert from the Nobel awards committee, Swedish Physicist Hans Wilhelmsson said, "We would have been happy to give the prize to this other person, but there wasn't enough reason to do so." Added Caltech Astrophysicist Jesse Greenstein: "Her role was like that of a part-time newspaper correspondent who spots a big fire but doesn't - or can't - do anything about...
...days and weeks before spring vacation the images become unbearable in their vividness and unruly in their allure. The tolling of the Mem Church bell at the end of a lecture becomes the age-old ring of a village steeple in Italy, calling the peasants from the surrounding fields to the Sunday service. The blue cover of the exam book in front of us becomes the alluring azure of an Algerian afternoon sky. The steam from a dining hall cup of coffee becomes the aromatic wisp from a demitasse of espresso sipped in a sidewalk cafe on Paris Left Bank...