Word: compressive
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...traveling by ship from India to England to take up studies at Cambridge in the early 1930s, the young Chandrasekhar came to an astonishing conclusion. His calculations showed that if a star is larger than 1.4 times the mass of the sun when it begins its collapse, it will compress to a state even more dense than that of a white dwarf. How far could the star collapse? In one of the great understatements of modern science, Chandrasekhar would only say: "One is left speculating on other possibilities...
...future NASA could launch a great fleet of robot spaceships to attract bits of free-floating iron in near by interstellar space, like children herding filings with magnets. Eventually so much matter would be gathered up that ,he particles would begin attracting one another by their mutual gravity and compress themselves into a black hole of some ten solar masses. The purpose of this iron sun? To provide instantaneous transportation across the heavens for anyone brave enough to take the plunge...
...chips of ink. Meidner seems to have translated the textures of wood block into pen-and-ink. The result is powerful in its simplicity; Figure in the Street at Night (1913) is an outstanding example of the potential force of Meidner's technique. The buildings, suggested in heavy strokes, compress the central explosion of light, rendered in sharp radiating lines. The lone, fleeing stick-figure can find no escape...
...final connection came in 1972, the authors relate. Brucker missed it because, although he is not a large man, he was not able to compress his body enough to get through a tight spot, now officially labeled the Tight Spot. The most effective member of the connection party was a small (115 lbS.), wiry woman named Pat Crowther. Large, lordly people are handicapped as cavers, of course, and flyweight readers will follow Crowther's muddy tracks with tears of appreciation in their eyes. When she and her skinny companions popped like corks through the Tight Spot and moved...
...Napoleon focuses on one of the most complex and ideologically riven epochs in history. Unfortunately, it is a period that fits awkwardly into the Durants' Procrustean formula. Merely to introduce Bonaparte into destiny's pages requires a recapitulation of the entire French Revolution. The Durants compress that cataclysm to 152 pages-an entertaining but misshapen account. The causes of the infamous Terror are summed up in a brief section, leaving the reader reeling under a scattershot assault of dates and statistics. The guillotine devours French leaders at such a bewildering pace that the list of names often reads...