Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Indeed, there is no border on earth that separates two more widely divergent standards of living, and conflicts over trade, illegal immigration and drug smuggling have soured relations between the neighboring nations. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger made matters worse by his high-handed treatment of Mexican envoys (see following story). Then, to stem the northward flow of illegal immigrants (nearly 1 million last year), U.S. authorities proposed sealing off parts of the frontier with sharpened steel-mesh fencing. Mexican newspapers indignantly accused the U.S. of raising 'the tortilla curtain...
Radiating prodigious amounts of energy, they are visible on earth despite the fact that they may be the most distant objects in the universe. Pulsars, or neutron stars, have also been detected; these highly compressed cadavers of massive stars usually signal their existence by their highly regular radio beeps. Even stranger are the giant stars that may have in effect gone down the cosmic drain: those elusive black holes, with gravitational fields so powerful that not even light can escape them. Astronomers have also picked up what may be the echo of the Creation. Coming from everywhere in the skies...
Scientists are also conducting ever more sensitive tests of Einstein's theory. M.I.T.'s Shapiro and his colleagues have been sending radio signals past the rim of the sun, bouncing them off other planets and clocking their return to earth to an accuracy of better than a millionth of a second. The object: to see if solar gravity slows the signals down by the amount forecast by Einstein. So far, general relativity has passed these and other tests without exception. Says Yale Physicist Feza Gursey: "Einstein's theories tend to become stronger with time...
...time and distance are equally fickle and depend on the relative motion of observers. The only absolute remaining is the speed of light. Out of this theorizing emerged some bizarre conclusions about the effect of so-called relativistic speeds, those near the velocity of light. As an observer on earth, for example, watches a spacecraft move away at about 260,000 km (160,-000 miles) per second, time aboard the ship (assuming he is able to see the ship's clock) seems to him to move at only half the rate that it would on earth. The mass...
...expansive city of Houston inspired one reporter to venture a faintly salty comment. Confronted by an exhibit of lunar modules, space suits and moon buggies at the Lyndon Johnson Space Center, he saw fit to paraphrase ex-Premier Chou Enlai: "We have too many problems down here on earth. Until we solve them, there's no point in going to the moon...