Word: predictional
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Washington, where people never tire of trying to predict what unpredictable Mr. Roosevelt will do, people predicted: the release of 75 more destroyers, a deal to turn over to England a large proportion of the U. S. merchant marine, an assembly plant to turn out standardized ships for Britain in wholesale quantities, the repeal of the Neutrality Act, the repeal of the Johnson Act (prohibiting loans to govern ments in default on World War I debts). In official circles, outright repeal of the Johnson Act or a scheme for circumventing it was freely prophesied. The raid which gutted Coventry...
Transits of Mercury are a means of charting its queerly complicated orbit. The long axis of its elliptical orbit does not stay fixed, but slowly rotates, and the planet's point of nearest approach to the sun shifts each year. Calculations of classical Newtonian gravitation predict some shift, but not nearly so much as that actually observed. In desperation a French astronomer named Leverrier decided that the rest of the shift must be due to an unseen planet even closer to the sun than Mercury. Leverrier called it "Vulcan." He looked long and hard for it. Once a doctor...
Then in 1915 Einstein produced his General Theory of Relativity, a beautiful theoretical concept but, after all, just a theory. Yet the Relativity mathematics was found to predict a shift of Mercury's orbit which was practically the same as the observed shift. This was the first observational prop for Relativity.* So Einstein may have felt a nostalgic glow last week, if anyone remembered to tell him that Mercury was transiting (passing directly between the sun and the earth...
...emergency mobilization, the 104,000 members of the Officers Reserve Corps (within the age limits of their grades) had kept up their training by correspondence courses, summer training camps, occasional tours of active duty. When the Army began filling out its regular units with reservists, no professional officer could predict with certainty how well doctors, lawyers, policemen and clerks would function as commanders of field units. Last week General Staff officers at Washington surveyed the Organized Reserves' performance, found it good...
...where our poll might conceivably reflect true public opinion more accurately than the election itself." But he also insists on the limitations of his polls. He steadfastly refuses to make any forecast of electoral votes. The important and proper use of his political surveys is, he insists, not to predict elections but to obtain an over-all view of popular sentiment on public issues...