Word: physicists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...solar emissions, probing for the outer boundary of the solar system and even abetting the efforts of scientists pursuing SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. When Pioneer was launched in March 1972, its primary assignment, ordained by NASA, was to reach the environment of Jupiter. At the time, says physicist James Van Allen, the discoverer of Earth's radiation belt and a principal contributor to Pioneer's achievements, "this objective was regarded as a bold one." While unmanned U.S. and Soviet spacecraft had visited the inner planets, none had flown beyond Mars and braved the asteroid belt to reach Jupiter...
...ready to leave. For others, human idiocy becomes increasingly precious; they begin to see in the state of mind we will have in heaven. "What about heaven?" I said to Harold, who is ninety-four and lives in the VA Hospital in Tucson. He said, "Memory is heaven." The physicist emeritus tottering across the campus of Cal Tech through the hazy sunshine occasionally chuckles to himself. Yet it has happened to many others, and to you, too, Galway--when illness, or unhappiness, or imagining the future wears an empty place inside us, the idea of paradise elsewhere quickly fills...
What's most surprising, observes Joe Gurman, a space physicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, is that all this is occurring despite the fact that we're currently in a solar minimum--the interval of relative calm that reigns between the end of one 11-year sunspot cycle and the beginning of another. Sunspots always signal more violent solar activity than average. But, says Gurman: "We now know that there's no such thing as a quiet...
...blobs of plasma. Ejected at extremely high speeds, they push particles through the magnetosphere with an unusual amount of oomph. During solar minimum, the biggest blobs come from openings in the sun's magnetic field called coronal holes. "Gas spews out of these holes," explains University of Colorado space physicist Daniel Baker, "like water from a fire hose's nozzle." If the nozzle is aimed toward earth, the consequences can be dramatic. Plasma from coronal holes may well have triggered the geomagnetic storms that crippled the Anik E-1 satellite and temporarily disabled at least six others...
Lamm, unlike his rival, has managed to lasso a running mate: former two-term G.O.P. Congressman from Silicon Valley and high-tech executive Ed Zschau. Zschau (rhymes with wow), a Stanford-trained physicist who started his own computer business before entering Congress, has said Lamm's campaign should be "inspired chaos." His scientific analysis is already on target. Lamm has raised only about $100,000 and is not going to entice many new supporters with sound bites like this: "America is like the drunk who's looking for his keys under the streetlight even though he lost them down...