Word: lightly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Working at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile last February, Kirshner says his team was taking pictures of the light emitted from supernova Puppis A, a remnant discovered in the 1950s, which has been studied "off and on" ever since. Astronomers usually study the light spectra from all sorts of astronomical bodies to learn about their physical and chemical characteristics, Kirshner says...
...seem useless, if not ridiculous. But to others, the ideas are brain teasers that both challenge and stretch the imagination. While thinking about wormholes has no immediate practical value, Guth insists that it helps scientists explore how flexible the laws of physics are. More important, the theories could shed light on some of the most fundamental questions of cosmology: how the universe began, how it works and how it might...
...comes directly from the accepted concepts of general relativity. In that theory, Einstein argued that very massive or dense objects distort space and time around them. One possible distortion is in the form of a tube that can lead anywhere in the universe -- even to a spot billions of light-years away. The name wormhole comes about by analogy: imagine a fly on an apple. The only way the fly can reach the apple's other side is the long way, over the fruit's surface. But a worm could bore a tunnel through the apple, shortening the trip considerably...
Virtually instantaneous travel leads to the idea of wormhole as time machine. If it were somehow possible to move one end of a wormhole at nearly the speed of light, general relativity dictates that time at that end would slow down, and that portion of the tunnel would then be younger than the other end. Anything moving from the faster-aging end of the wormhole to the slower would essentially go backward in time. The mode of travel, however, could be nothing like the mechanical time machine, complete with saddle, envisioned by H.G. Wells. It is hard to conceive...
They are Dennis the Menace come to life, half-pint hellions who drive parents and teachers to distraction with their disruptive antics. At home they clamber on kitchen counters, unscrew light bulbs and mess up the simplest tasks, from hanging up their clothes to making the bed. In school they throw erasers, kick desks, shove classmates and are so busy making nuisances of themselves that they fail to absorb their lessons. One bedeviled mother speaks for many when she says, "I would have given the kid away...