Word: rayed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Spread over miles of desert near Albuquerque, shallow disks of special plastic material bake in the sun. Connected by wire to a central laboratory, they are scintillometers set out to watch for enormously powerful cosmic rays that smack into atoms in the high atmosphere and, as a result of the crash, spray the earth's surface with millions of subatomic particles. Despite the minute size of his quarry, Physicist John Linsley of M.I.T., who operates the ray trap, reported a tremendous catch: a shower of 50 billion particles...
According to Linsley's calculations, the primary ray that caused all the ruckus must have had 100 billion billion electron-volts of energy-three billion times the power of man's biggest atom smashers. If the cosmic-ray invader consisted of only one proton, as Linsley believes, its fierce energy must have made it weigh 100 billion times as much as a normal earthly proton...
...Linsley believes that his fat proton must have come from some turbulent galaxy in far-distant space, where great forces exist that could give it the energy that it carried to earth. In the past, cosmic-ray scientists have only speculated about such turbulent galaxies, but radio astronomers have recently found a host of likely candidates. They seem to have blown up in some mysterious way and are giving off vast amounts of radio waves (TIME, Dec. 14). Dr. Linsley suspects that his fat proton may have got its speed and energy in one of these enormous explosions that involved...
Pickering's progress was smooth and steady. B.S., M.S., Ph.D.-he got all the requisite degrees. He stayed on in Pasadena to join the Caltech faculty, get married to a pretty Pomona girl named Muriel Bowler and conduct cosmic ray studies under Millikan. In 1944, when JPL missiles and rockets had become sophisticated enough to require a cargo of accurate telemetering equipment, Pickering was the inevitable choice to supervise the work; he was an acknowledged expert in the electronics art of long-distance measurement and control...
After putting grasshopper-light radio equipment on high-flying cosmic-ray sounding balloons, making rockets tell about their troubles was simple. Says Caltech Aerodynamics Professor Homer Joe Stuart, a JPL pioneer: "It is interesting to think what the Germans could have done with a Pickering. We learned after the war that they conducted 1,700 test flights with V-2 rockets. That number is unbelievable until you remember that they had no telemetry worth the name. Their severe security kept their best electronics people from coordinating with their rocket program...