Word: orbit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...another useful property: it was presumed to be motionless, and therefore it provided the basic frame of reference from which all motions were measured. A star, for instance, could be said to be moving so many miles per hour through the ether. When the earth swung around its orbit, it moved through the ether too, creating an "ether wind" blowing past...
...Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley tried to measure this ether wind. Their idea was to measure the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) against the speed of the earth's motion on its orbit around the sun (18.5 miles per second). They set up their apparatus, an affair of many mirrors, in a lab in a downtown Cleveland building. Once a day the earth's rotation aligned the apparatus with the earth's path around the sun. If there were an ether wind, the light flashing across their lab floor should be slowed...
...freedom strong?by confronting it with its sternest tests?was the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev. In 1957 Khrushchev's Sputniks made him Man of the Year. In 1959 he scored even greater successes in space: on Jan. 2 the U.S.S.R. sent a 3,245-lb. package into sun orbit as the first man-made planet; eight months later, a Soviet rocket smacked the face of the moon, and on Oct. 4, two years to the day after Sputnik I, the Russians launched a rocket that passed around and photographed the moon's hidden far side...