Word: linearities
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Britain's schoolchildren grapple for years with three different and conflicting methods of measuring weight (avoirdupois, troy and apothecaries' table), three ways of measuring length (linear, chain and nautical), and a bewildering variety of dry and liquid measurements, ranging from drachms, grains and scruples to tuns, hogsheads and chaldrons. Port is measured in pipes (105 gals.), people in stones (14 Ibs.), pickled peppers in pecks (554.84 cu. in.). For good measure, Britain's hundredweight is 112 Ibs., not 100; the pennyweight has been unrelated to the weight of any penny for a century and a half...
...reform, the House of Commons debated a weights and measures bill no less momentous than the Act of 1824 that abolished Queen Anne's wine gallon (231 cu. in.) and the ale gallon (282) in favor of the present imperial gallon (277.4). The government bill abolishes entirely the linear measurement, beloved of school textbooks, known as rod, pole or perch, a 5 ½yd. unit based originally on the combined length of the left feet of 16 men. The government also lengthens the yard* and lightens the pound to conform to international standards, and in five years it will...
...Nobel Prizewinning Exobiologist Joshua Lederberg's effort to build a TV-microscope to land on Mars and sample possible life there. Even more conducive to Big Science at Palo Alto is Sterling's most audacious 1962 coup: a $114 million AEC contract to build a two-mile linear accelerator, which eventually will be the world's most powerful atom smasher...
Technicians speak of an electron "beam," but it is incorrect to think off the machine as producing a continuous flow of high-energy electrons. In reality, the electrons spurt into the ring from the linear accelerator in bunches of 100 million at the rate of 60 bunches per second. At 16 places in the ring, there are radio-frequency powered acceleration cavities. Each time the electron bunch passes through a cavity, its energy increases. The electron pulses thus receive discrete "kicks" of energy as they orbit, until they have finally reached the energy level desired for any particular experiment...
When planning for the accelerator begain in 1954, the 11 million dollar anticipated outlay by the AEC was unusually large. It is worth nothing, however, that last spring, just as Cambridge accelerator started operations, the government approved an expenditure of 114 million to build the two-mile Linear Accelerator near Stanford University in Palo Alto, California...