Word: physicists
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Once the nature of the approaching object is determined, explains physicist Edward Tagliaferri, a U.S. space program consultant, "it becomes easier to decide if you want a standoff explosion, a surface explosion or a subsurface explosion," If the asteroid or comet is small, it can be vaporized with a subsurface explosion, but for larger bodies, says Tagliaferri, "you'll probably have to nudge them into a new orbit." For an asteroid consisting largely of iron, he says, "you'd probably want to have a surface explosion...
...relativity, which utterly changed how scientists see time and space. Writers have tried to explain relativity ever since, but Alan Lightman, who teaches physics and writing at M.I.T., has an entirely new approach. EINSTEIN'S DREAMS (Pantheon, $17) is a novel, an impressionistic look at thoughts the great physicist might have had while concocting his theory. We are privy to musings about worlds where time runs backward or branches into diverging streams. The writing, beautifully simple, conveys better than most texts the strangeness of Einstein's ideas...
Over the next four years, a 1.3-m telescope on Mount Stromlo, in Australia, mounted with sophisticated digital cameras, will methodically search for MACHOs by peering at stars in the nearby dwarf galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. If MACHOs exist, explains physicist Christopher Stubbs of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who helped design the experiment, they should occasionally pass between the earth and these background stars. Because gravity bends light, the MACHOs would act as lenses, causing the stars temporarily to brighten enough for the cameras to detect...
Theorists have already deduced that the top quark is heavier than any known particle. "A single top quark," exclaims Fermilab physicist Alvin Tollestrup, "probably weighs at least as much as a whole silver atom does." (With an atomic weight of 108, a silver atom is made up of hundreds of up and down quarks.) Exactly how much top quarks weigh is a question scientists are anxious to answer, but first they must find some to measure -- a task considerably complicated by the fact that in nature these massive but ethereal entities made only a cameo appearance, just after...
...close relative of the electron. At least, it appeared to be a muon. The reason scientists aren't sure is that the portion of the detector responsible for tracking muons is segmented like an orange. "And with the malice often displayed by inanimate objects," says University of Chicago physicist Henry Frisch with a sigh, "this muon went right up a crack between the segments...