Word: lightness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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According to the relativity equations, that "tachyon" (a name that Feinberg coined from the Greek word for "swift") should have other strange characteristics. Unlike familiar particles, which gam mass and energy as they accelerate toward the speed of light, Femberg's particle would lose mass and energy as it accelerated beyond the light barrier. At infinite speeds, it would theoretically have no mass or energy at all. Like a plane going faster than the speed of sound, a tachyon with an electrical charge would generate a "light boom" as it traveled faster than 186,000 m.p.s. The boom would...
...somehow harnessed-Feinberg's dreamed-of trip to the distant stars may yet be possible. The Einstein barrier to higher speeds would still be unbreakable by man and his spacecraft, but with their unbelievable speeds, the particles could serve to accelerate men closer to the velocity of light...
...witnesses really as apathetic as social critics usually portray them? Perhaps not. In what the American Association for the Advancement of Science calls 1968's best sociopsychological research, Professors John M. Darley of Princeton and Bibb Latané of Ohio State portray homo urbanus in an entirely different light. Testing the reaction of college students to a feigned emergency, they found that the emotions of those who remained quiet hardly registered what could be called indifference. Often their hands trembled, their palms sweated. If anything, they were more nervous than those who reported the crisis. "The bystander," conclude Darley...
...superior pretentions of the "larks." Humans run on still-mysterious physiological clocks, their body temperatures dipping as much as 2 degrees in the middle of the night and rising toward morning. Late risers, one explanation runs, simply may not be hot enough to get up easily. Deep sleep and light sleep also alternate at different rates; many researchers now argue that slow risers are in a period of heavy sleep when their alarm clocks clang. For yet unexplained reasons, however, some 20% of Americans enjoy accurate internal alarm clocks that wake them automatically...
...truth, or the quest for the truth. It was a game which men had set up for themselves; and they had made the rules so that they would always win. One can always take a poem and analyze it. One can always trace the images of light and darkness in a novel. It is all a game--a game which we all play, with whose answers we all content ourselves--but it is not the truth, and it is not reality...