Word: eckert
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SILENT SKY by Allan W. Eckert. 243 pages. Little, Brown...
Schweitzer clearly intended Lambarene to be his monument, and just before he died happily supervised the completion of a new ward. But soon after his burial, Schweitzer's daughter, Rhena Eckert, as much as admitted that the hospital might have a hard time surviving. "We will try to carry on his work," she told reporters, "but Lambarene as a spiritual center is irrevocably gone." In time, the Gabonese villagers may come to prefer the gleaming white government hospital a mile up the river. But Lambarene, and the world, will always have the memory of a giant who tried...
Resetting the Clock. Columbia University Astronomer Wallace J. Eckert and Graduate Student H. F. Smith Jr. of IBM's Watson Laboratory at Columbia began by analyzing the moon's orbit with IBM's fast-figuring computers. The moon's position has been observed with precision for 200 years, so there was more than enough data to feed into the machines. After they pondered electronically for several hundred hours, weighing the effects of the earth, sun, planets and relativity on the moon's orbit, the computers reported that in a three-year cycle the moon would...
Ingenious Theory. What was missing from the mathematical calculations, Dr. Eckert thinks, is a vital assumption: the moon has no heavy core like the earth's. Instead, it must have a heavy shell with lighter material inside. This would make the moon more reluctant to turn on its axis, and the extra resistance would account for its computer-calculated shift of orbit...
...Eckert does not claim to know how the moon became lighthearted. One possibility is that it was originally formed of rather light rock that froze and became rigid, perhaps entrapping gases deep below the surface. Then, during two or three billion years, meteors rained on its surface, building up a thick layer of iron and other heavy materials. The truth of this ingenious theory will not be susceptible to a final check until a seismograph set by man on the moon's surface studies its interior by means of moon-quake waves...