Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...long, low-frequency waves from the universe never reach terrestrial receivers because they are blocked by the earth's ionosphere, the outer layer of the atmosphere composed of ionized, or charged, molecules and free electrons. These long radio waves convey a great deal of information--about the origin of cosmic rays, magnetic fields in space, the mechanism of solar flares, and radio storms on Jupiter, for example. To record these long waves, Harvard, in cooperation with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, has built and orbited a series of small radio telescopes above the opaque ionosphere...
...Harvard psychologists have carried on wide-ranging experiments with mind-altering drugs. At the university's Center for Research in Personality, they sent their graduate-student subjects floating off into other-worldly visions of new and fantastic forms of "reality" and a new meaning of life. Now the cosmic ball is over. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, both Ph.D.s, are being dropped from the Harvard faculty because university authorities agree with the medical profession that the drugs they used are too dangerous for campus experiments. But the two psychologists are acting blithely unconcerned...
According to Linsley's calculations, the primary ray that caused all the ruckus must have had 100 billion billion electron-volts of energy-three billion times the power of man's biggest atom smashers. If the cosmic-ray invader consisted of only one proton, as Linsley believes, its fierce energy must have made it weigh 100 billion times as much as a normal earthly proton...
Where did the fat proton with its great cargo of energy come from? Cosmic rays are generally believed to be charged particles that have been speeded up by magnetic fields that are known to exist be tween the stars. But though this theory serves well enough for ordinary rays, the Milky Way galaxy to which the sun and its planets belong lacks magnetism strong enough to load 10²° electron-volts on a lone proton. Nothing else in the galaxy, such as an exploding supernova, could do the job either...
...Linsley believes that his fat proton must have come from some turbulent galaxy in far-distant space, where great forces exist that could give it the energy that it carried to earth. In the past, cosmic-ray scientists have only speculated about such turbulent galaxies, but radio astronomers have recently found a host of likely candidates. They seem to have blown up in some mysterious way and are giving off vast amounts of radio waves (TIME, Dec. 14). Dr. Linsley suspects that his fat proton may have got its speed and energy in one of these enormous explosions that involved...