Word: solar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Menzel, also a professor of Astrophysics and Associate Director for Solar Research, succeeded Harlow Shapley, Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy, as head of the Observatory in 1952; he is the author of "Flying Sancers...
...mysteries of geology is why the earth's climate has changed. During some geological ages, the whole earth has been abnormally warm, at other times abnormally cool. This sort of change can be attributed to variations in solar radia tion or some other allover effect. At times, parts of the earth that are now cool had tropical climates, while parts now tropical were covered with ice. The obvious explanation is that the poles and the icecaps associated with them were then in different parts of the earth's-surface, but this theory is hard to prove...
...reasoning about the universe, said Cosmologist Thomas Gold, "we must be on our guard against that evil intruder 'common sense.' " Common sense, Gold pointed out, is derived from human experience with objects of moderate size such as the human body and the solar system. Scientists now know that very small objects (i.e., subatomic particles) behave in a non-commonsensical way. Very large objects may behave unreasonably...
Unnatural Laws. The things that science deals with, said Gold, range in size from electrons (radius 10 -13 cm) to the universe itself (radius 10 27 cm). Man, the earth and the solar system lie midway between the two extremes, and the laws that govern them have become so familiar that any deviation seems wrong. But gravitation, one ruling common-sense force, is ignored by subatomic particles, which are attracted to one another by enormously strong forces effective only at very short distances. To explain events in the "microphysical" world, scientists need the "unnatural" rules of quantum theory...
...least 100 Britons are threatened with partial blindness as a result of watching the solar eclipse on June 30, reported three hospitals in Scotland. Some victims may have suffered permanent damage to the macula (the point of clearest vision at the retina's center), in the future would see well only out of the corner of the eye. Two-thirds of the reported cases were in eastern Scotland, where skies were clearest. Doctors in the U.S., where the eclipse could be seen only during early-morning hours, have so far reported only three cases of eye damage, none...