Word: ethereality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...symbol of the unity of all organic life. Most important, his moun tain treks re-enacted his artistic aspirations. More than any composer before or since, Webern worked on the timberline between sound and silence. His austere, rigorously condensed pieces seem to hover in a clear, rarefied ether of their own, like clusters of ice crystals on the point of vaporizing. ''Scarcely audible,'' ''dying away'' are typical directions in his scores...
...checking the tires and wiping the windshield. Many station owners still try to hold prices down in order to achieve high volume. "Rocky" Minetti, who manages an Esso station in Pittsburgh, maintained his price of 64.9? per gal. for unleaded right up to the end of last week, while ether stations in his area were charging...
...impossible to detect. Putting the theory into elegant mathematical form, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz added another idea: permeating the structure of all matter, the ether would also slow down clocks traveling through it?in fact, just enough so light's speed would always seem constant...
Even to scientists of the day, these theories seemed patchwork: they dealt with nagging questions, but in an artificial and contrived way. Yet they contained seeds of truth. Science was groping toward the answer to the ether dilemma and the limitations of Newtonian physics. And even without Einstein, someone eventually would have solved the puzzle...
Einstein boldly disregarded the notion of the ether. Then he went on to state two postulates: 1) An experiment can detect only relative motion, that is, the motion of one observer with respect to an other. 2) Regardless of the motion of its source, light always moves through emp ty space at a constant speed (this seems to violate common sense, which suggests that light projected forward from a moving spacecraft, like a bullet fired from a plane, would travel at a speed equal to its velocity plus that of the craft). From these statements, using thought experiments and simple...