Word: phenomena
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...considered following the example of people who debunk claims of the supernatural by offering huge cash rewards to anyone who can produce positive evidence of suspicious phenomena...
...POWER, by James Mills (Warner; 406 pages; $21.95), is a brave and probably foolhardy try at combining the structure of a conventional spy thriller with what spy fans are likely to consider a lot of annoying nonsense about occult forces and psychic phenomena. Jack Hammond is a U.S. spy who gets caught between two beautiful Soviet witches. Evil, gorgeous Darya can dematerialize herself and drive men mad with multiple orgasms. She can also fox computer memories and detonate nuclear warheads. Good, gorgeous Valentina uses the power of Jesus for psychic healing. Hammond's problem is to keep sickly General Secretary...
...schools, part of the urban Atlanta Public School system, exemplified the best progressive leanings in Southern society. Yet no teacher ever hinted at the importance of that. My friends and I were taught in detail about the South's civil rights abuses, but were practically never exposed to similar phenomena in the North. We understood every aspect of the "white flight" from our own schools, but never heard a whisper about the Boston busing fiasco. I figured that race relations in the North were like one big Sesame Street--everyone a cheerful next-door neighbor...
When Albert Einstein unveiled his general theory of relativity in 1916, he predicted several phenomena that could be used to test its validity. Two of them -- that light is bent by gravity and that the orbit of Mercury wobbles in a certain way -- were confirmed within just a few years, convincing scientists that relativity was a revolutionary discovery, not just a mathematical curiosity. But Einstein thought another of his claims would never be proved. His theory predicted that fast-moving, massive objects emit gravity waves, small distortions moving through the fabric of space and time. Einstein said these waves would...
...times as sensitive as existing gravity-wave detectors. That should be enough not only to confirm relativity but also to probe deeply into the most violent processes in the cosmos, including ) exploding supernovas, collisions between black holes, and "starquakes" on the semisolid surfaces of neutron stars. All of these phenomena are believed to send out characteristic bursts of gravity waves. Says Rochus Vogt, the Caltech physics professor who heads the joint M.I.T.-Caltech team that will build LIGO: "We are going to look at a whole new force as a transmitter of signals from the universe. That is bound...