Word: ethers
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...century, the prevailing idea was that light is a wave motion, and therefore needs a medium to travel in, as sound waves travel in air. Since light passes unhindered through vacuums, including the vacuum between the stars and the earth, 19th century scientists were driven to postulate a "luminiferous ether." which filled all space. It offered no resistance to the motions of stars or planets, but carried light waves with perfect efficiency...
Broadcasting, said he. needs not merely "a traffic policeman of the ether" to regulate frequencies-about all there is now-but supervision to ensure that broadcasters are motivated by what ex-President Hoover called "something more than naked commercial selfishness." Holders of station licenses, said Rogers, are "trustees for the public," and what he thought of some trustees was made abundantly clear by his review of the quiz scandals...
Glass & Golf. The first bubble chamber, invented in 1953 by Dr. Donald Glaser of the University of Michigan, was a glass tube filled with ether at a temperature that would make it start to boil when pressure was suddenly reduced. If high-energy particles (e.g., protons from a cyclotron) are shot into the ether at the right moment, lines of bubbles form on their trails, thus showing where the particles go and how they interact with atoms in the ether. When Inventor Glaser delivered his classic paper at a Washington physics convention. Physicist Luis Alvarez, associate director of the Radiation...
...across dry land in a sieve." Author Shattuck sees Jarry as a comedian and wizard whose farcical wand-waving expressed a world in which Nietzsche's famed dictum-"God is dead"-was translated into a scandalous joke. Jarry enthusiastically drank absinthe and, near the end of his life, ether (he died at 34). At the theater he wore a dirty white canvas suit and a makeshift paper shirt with the tie painted on in India ink. He was, said Gide, "an incredible figure . . . plaster-faced . . . gotten up like a circus clown and acting a fantastic, strenuously contrived role which...
...Richard Wagner, the shimmering strains of Lohengrin's "Prelude" suggested a clear image: "Out of the clear blue ether of the sky there seems to condense a wonderful . . . vision; and out of this there gradually emerges ... an angel host bearing in its midst the Holy Grail ... It pours out exquisite odors, like streams of gold." The opening scene of Wieland's production duly provided a blinding cobalt blue sky against which was ranged a semicircle of knights in dazzling silver mail. The oak tree where King Heinrich holds court was reduced to a circular cluster of painted branches...