Word: elemental
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...have actually sent a few whistles up and down AEC corridors." Probably the papers most useful to the scientists will be of no public interest at all. They will be minute details about obscure matters. One British paper, for instance, tells about the troublesome chemistry of ruthenium, a rare element that had almost no importance before atomic science was born. But it is a fission product formed in nuclear reactors, and it has to be dealt with during the purification of reactor fuels. The information in the U.S. paper probably represents hundreds of man-years of scientific labor...
...least, it will save that amount of effort for nations that have not yet gotten that far with the atom. Another example is "cross sections." the term that nuclear physicists use to describe how strongly an element absorbs neutrons of different energies. Cross sections are difficult to measure, and there are thousands of them. The U.S. has been lavish with cross-section figures and curves. Russia's Vavilov has confided that they will help his country enormously in its peaceful atom work...
...metal sculpture school has roots as far back as Vulcan. Its immediate antecedent is constructivism, proclaimed by two Russian-born brothers, Naum Gabo (now in the U.S.) and Antoine Pevsner (now in Paris), who in 1920 revolted against cubism: "Depth alone can express space. We reject mass as an element of sculpture . . ." By approaching the problem like engineers, Gabo and Pevsner (see color page opposite) turned out metal objects that have the smooth, polished beauty-and the coldness-of a mathematical equation...
...design the rocketships for the future. All they need for a trip to the moon, they say, is sufficient funds ($4 billion) and an all-out engineering effort like the one that produced the Abomb. To British Astronomer J. G. Porter, writing in the scientific monthly Discovery, "some element of doubt creeps in." His engineering brethren, he says, have overlooked some basic difficulties obvious to any stargazer...
...over the womanly moon. They made a hero out of a man like Hercules, changing him from a mere lover-victim of the goddess into a lusty seducer of hapless nymphs and a symbol of strength. Socrates and Plato, Graves insists, went so far as to reject the female element completely, injected into Western veins a strong shot of romantic homosexuality that persists to this...