Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Spread over miles of desert near Albuquerque, shallow disks of special plastic material bake in the sun. Connected by wire to a central laboratory, they are scintillometers set out to watch for enormously powerful cosmic rays that smack into atoms in the high atmosphere and, as a result of the crash, spray the earth's surface with millions of subatomic particles. Despite the minute size of his quarry, Physicist John Linsley of M.I.T., who operates the ray trap, reported a tremendous catch: a shower of 50 billion particles...
...part a mystery. Once Goodman noticed two people sunning themselves on the deck of a ship; these became two eerie figures in ghostly robes lying in a landscape that appears to have no beginning and no end, and what is commonplace thus takes on the aura of being cosmic...
Pickering's progress was smooth and steady. B.S., M.S., Ph.D.-he got all the requisite degrees. He stayed on in Pasadena to join the Caltech faculty, get married to a pretty Pomona girl named Muriel Bowler and conduct cosmic ray studies under Millikan. In 1944, when JPL missiles and rockets had become sophisticated enough to require a cargo of accurate telemetering equipment, Pickering was the inevitable choice to supervise the work; he was an acknowledged expert in the electronics art of long-distance measurement and control...
After putting grasshopper-light radio equipment on high-flying cosmic-ray sounding balloons, making rockets tell about their troubles was simple. Says Caltech Aerodynamics Professor Homer Joe Stuart, a JPL pioneer: "It is interesting to think what the Germans could have done with a Pickering. We learned after the war that they conducted 1,700 test flights with V-2 rockets. That number is unbelievable until you remember that they had no telemetry worth the name. Their severe security kept their best electronics people from coordinating with their rocket program...
...says: The "large, polymorphous student body" poses a "frightful prospect of insecurity and alienation." Last we get too cosmic, sir, is one to conclude that this "prospect" is peculiar to this particular campus...