Word: lightness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Helpful Hints. As serious as the situation is, there is a light side. Hundreds of suggestions have flooded the Federal Aviation Administration offering helpful hints to halt the hijacking, indicating that the American public is always anxious to help. Sometimes too anxious. One letter writer recommends stripping passengers nude on flights headed for Miami "so that everybody can see everything and nobody can hide a weapon." Another suggests that only the sexiest stewardesses should be assigned to southbound flights so that, if the need arose, they could seduce the skyjacker in midair...
...printed a continuing debate be tween Authors Isaac Asimov and Ar thur C. Clarke over the existence of a particle that travels faster than light...
Feinberg has long felt frustrated by Einstein's 1905 conclusion that velocities greater than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) are absolutely im possible. Such speeds must be approached before man will ever be able to travel to distant stars, and Feinberg says that he does not "like the thought of being permanently confined by lim ited velocities to a small region around our solar system...
...that hemmed-in feeling, Feinberg brazenly began questioning the inviolable Einsteinian speed limit more than a dec ade ago. But no matter how he analyzed the set of mathematical equations that define relativity, he could not es cape the conclusion that matter cannot be accelerated to the speed of light, to say nothing of higher velocities. The equations showed that at the velocity of light, the mass and energy of any ordinary particle would become infinite -a clearly impossible situation. Beyond it, his mathematics suggested, the mass and energy of the particle can only be represented by the kind...
...ingenious idea. If mass becomes imaginary at high velocities, why not see what happens when an imaginary number is substituted for mass at rest? When he made the substitution, he was able to derive a real number for the energy of a particle traveling above the speed of light. Translating this concept into physical terms, Feinberg conjured up a strange particle that seemed to exist only on the other side of the speed-of-light barrier; it could move at velocities greater than 186,000 m.p.s., but never at that speed or slower. Thus, because it could never stop...