Word: horowitz
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...Horowitz's slander wouldn't matter much if he spoke only for himself. But for the past three decades, Horowitz, 60, has been a conduit through which extreme political ideas gain access to the mainstream. During a previous incarnation as a leftist radical in the '70s, he was the editor who put a picture of a burning bank building on the cover of Ramparts magazine with the line, "The students who burned the Bank of America may have done more toward saving the environment than all the teach-ins put together." And the guy who continued to raise thousands...
...have been some tantalizing false alarms. Not only can suspect signals be elusively faint, they are also hard to separate from the universe's hodgepodge of natural noises. Given that, many scientists have begun wondering about entirely different kinds of extraterrestrial smoke signals, especially lasers. Says Harvard physicist Paul Horowitz, a veteran of many SETI radio searches: "Lasers are an interesting alternative...
...kick off his own O(for optical)SETI effort. Needing just three months and $20,000, his team built a stereo-size detector designed to look over the shoulder of Harvard's 61-in. telescope as it conducts regular studies of starlight. While stars typically pulsate comparatively slowly, Horowitz's device is calibrated to spot intense stellar flare-ups lasting only a few billionths of a second. Such "events," he figures, would probably be powerful bursts of artificial light aimed at us from an inhabited planet orbiting that star. In short, an interstellar hello...
...least that's the theory. Since the apparatus went online last October, it has studied some 2,000 sunlike stars, but detected only a few anomalous flashes--probably from high-energy particles that regularly shower the earth. "We're still investigating," Horowitz says...
...number of other teams in what is starting to look like OSETI mania. At Princeton, physicist David T. Wilkinson will soon begin surveying nearby stars with a detector similar to Horowitz's. At the University of California, Berkeley, extrasolar-planet hunter Geoff Marcy is re-examining his data for sharp spectral lines that might indicate a continuous beam of light intended as a low-power signal. Another Berkeley team, led by SETI veteran Dan Werthimer, is looking for short, powerful laser bursts in a series of automated observations of 2,500 nearby stars. Later he plans to turn to invisible...