Word: lightness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...circular glass disks, one at each end of a short cylinder formed by a flexible bellows. The inside of the cylinder is filled with a clear liquid, usually alcohol. By tilting one or both of the glass plates, the cylinder can be made wedge-shaped, like a prism. Light beams entering the glass plate at one end of the prism are thus bent and emerge from the other plate at a different angle...
...collar sense the motion and send signals that control miniature electric motors connected to the glass plates at each end of the prism. The motors, which respond almost instantaneously to movements of the optical instrument, tilt the plates to change the shape of the prism, thus bending the incoming light beams just enough to compensate for the motion. The result is a clear and remarkably steady image...
Corresponding Flashes. Although the target star seemed to be shining steadily, the astronomers fed its light into an electronic device that made 12,000 separate light-intensity measurements every second. They quickly discovered that the starlight increased to a peak about 30 times per second, a variation too rapid to be detected by the human eye. The flashes corresponded exactly to the radio pulses from the Crab pulsar, strongly suggesting that the target was indeed the pulsar. Unlike an earlier and apparently erroneous sighting of a flashing pulsar (TIME, May 31), this discovery was confirmed by the McDonald Observatory...
Astronomers do not yet know why the Crab pulsar flashes, but some suspect that its bursts of light are generated by charged particles in its intense magnetic field. Now that they have seen the light, scientists are attempting to take a clear spectrograph of the pulsar and to determine if the light itself is polarized. They are investigating a new report by astronomers at an observatory on Malta, who saw strange "ghost" flashes about 3° to either side of both the Crab pulsar and another nearby pulsar. With these new clues, scientists hope to be able to learn more...
Ravel's Jeux d'eau and Debussy's Feux d'artifice rippled with pinks and light blues. Prokofiev's fiery Sonata No. 7 was dramatic and brutal when it had to be, gentle when that was called for. To Manhattan critics in the audience, it seemed that Hollander had never before bared his inner feelings quite so convincingly...