Word: maartens
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ASTRONOMERS, physicists and even philosophers the world over are engaged these days in nothing less than a reappraisal of the origin and nature of the universe, largely because of the work of the man who appears on this week's cover. Dutch-born Professor Maarten Schmidt of California Institute of Technology is the astronomer who found the key to quasars (quasi-stellar radio sources), those bright, distant and mysterious objects that have been baffling astronomers. Now Schmidt and other scientists are using quasars to unlock some of nature's most difficult enigmas. Perhaps not since Galileo...
Some 30 evenings a year, Astronomer Maarten Schmidt, 36, struggles with an electrically heated flight suit and enters the great, silvery dome of California's Mount Palomar Observatory. There, his tall, gangling frame seems suddenly reduced to Lilliputian proportions by the mammoth, 200-in. telescope that towers above him. An elevator hauls him slowly to a cylindrical observer's cage inside the telescope itself, and the dome's curved doors slide open to the cold mountain air. Perched high above the observatory floor, with classical music from an all-night Los Angeles radio station in the background...
Music provides the Schmidts with still another form of diversion. Maarten plays the violin, Corrie the piano, and both are fond of chamber music. Visiting astronomers and relatives are often pressed into chamber music recitals at the Schmidt home. "If I play," admits Schmidt, "it has to be in an intimate circle. Only my best friends can really stand...
...elemental reac tions far out at the boundaries of perception, they may yet learn the ultimate secrets of matter and energy on earth. For science is fast advancing into areas where the old theories may no longer apply, where the old rules may no longer work. And if Maarten Schmidt's inspired deductions point the way toward totally new equations to account for the nature of the cosmos, Palomar's telescope will have led man to his closest glimpse of universal truths...
...everyone was feeling pretty democratic, but the palace aide, for some curious reason, still demurred. So finally, the Prince himself sneaked over, seized The Netherlands' Queen Juliana, 56, clad in a cocktail dress and suavely heaved her into the swimming pool at the Hotel Caravanserai on St. Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles. Thus the Dutch royal couple, on a ten-day tour of the islands, regally put everyone at ease. Prince Bernhard had already been dunked in his tux, most of the other guests had followed him in like a pack of performing Kennedys at Hickory Hill...