Word: blackett
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last fortnight Britain's famed, curly-haired Professor Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett of Manchester University told the Royal Society how the problem might be (perhaps has been) solved...
...everyone knows, said Blackett, the earth has a magnetic field, but no one has figured out why. The magnetism does not come from iron deep underground, because the earth's core is far too hot to be "ferro-magnetic." As early as 1891, physicists guessed that the magnetism might be due to some inherent property of revolving bodies. They could not prove...
Guiding Star. Last year some new evidence turned up. Dr. H. W. Babcock of Mt. Wilson Observatory, Calif, performed the unlikely feat of measuring (by spectrum analysis) the magnetic field of the star called 78 Virginis. When Professor Blackett heard about it, he grabbed pencil & paper. The star's size, mass and speed of revolution could be estimated fairly accurately. Nothing more was needed. The magnetic field of remote 78 Virginis just about proved what theorizing had already predicted: it was closely proportionate to the magnetic fields of the earth...
Three matching bits of evidence in a row were more than coincidence. While the Fellows of the Royal Society watched intently, Blackett wrote down an equation* which may become as famous as Einstein's law, E-mc². It looked like the physical hybrid which science had been searching for so eagerly. On one side of the equation was magnetism, an electrical effect; on the other were basic gravitational quantities...
Donald W. Blackett--Nancy Hill (Radcliffe...