Word: cosmologists
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...cosmologist Erich von Däniken conjures up primordial heroes from the plain of Nazca and the temples of Palenque ?extraterrestrial astronauts who strayed to this planet long ago and then vanished. Today heroes and leaders bred on the earth seem almost as scarce. "There is a very obvious dearth of people who seem able to supply convincing answers, or even point to directions toward solutions," says Harvard President Derek Bok. "Leadership," observes Northwestern University Political Scientist Louis Masotti, "is one of those things you don't know you need until you don't have...
What would happen to the solar system if half of the universe disappeared? From Newton to Einstein, most experts have agreed that nothing much would happen except that the sky would have fewer stars. But now British Cosmologist Fred Hoyle says that the sun would shine 100 times brighter and burn the earth to a crisp...
...Argument. Professor Philip Morrison of Cornell thinks the X rays may be generated when starlight picks up energy from high-speed electrons far out in space. Professor Minoru Oda of M.I.T. figures that the X rays come from a magnetic field surrounding the edges of the galactic nucleus. British Cosmologist Fred Hoyle suspects that they may be connected with the creation of new matter in the vast emptiness between the galaxies...
Though many a cosmologist was bothered by the bizarre idea of a swiftly expanding universe, no one yet has been able to prove it wrong. But last week in the British journal Nature, Physicist Alastair Ward of Glasgow's Royal College of Science and Technology suggested a possible way to squelch the big explosion and bring the universe back into a steady state of vast but stable dimensions. Colliding light beams may lose some of their energy, says Ward, as photons (particles of light) carom off other photons. The loss of energy might cause a lengthening of wave length...
...theory that led to the experiment goes back to 1953, when British Cosmologist Thomas Gold suggested that the initial pulse from the sun might be a shock wave analogous to the shock wave produced in air by a plane breaking through the sound barrier. Professor Gold knew that gas in interplanetary space is too thin to carry ordinary shock waves, which propagate by gas molecules bumping against each other. But solar shock waves, he argued, are different. They are caused by solar magnetic fields expanding suddenly into space and pushing ionized gas ahead of them. "It is a bit like...