Word: sonic
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...speed of sound in the air through which the plane is passing. In the warm air near the ground it is about 765 m.p.h., but it falls (to about 650 m.p.h. at 40,000 ft.) in the cold air of high altitudes. Well below these speeds, the "sonic barrier" makes itself felt, jamming an airplane's controls, destroying the lift of its wings. The P-80R got up to Mach .81 last week over the hot, sun-baked desert. If it had flown at 20,000 ft., it would have met less resistance from the thin upper...
...risk) to cross the supersonic thresholds of the mind-the point at which the familiar sound-lengths of human life dissolve into inhuman silence. If they pass the barrier of dissolution, they may investigate in uncompetitive privacy the mysteries inaudible to the other minds. If they can recross the sonic sill, alive and sane, they may report what they have experienced to men who, never having known the experience, will never quite understand the report. Franz Kafka ventured across the barrier, reported with an apparent lucidity the cryptographs of silence, and was little understood. "Franz Kafka," wrote Franz Werfel...
Last week Torontonians were startled to learn that Casa Loma had been the hush-hushest of all Canadian war plants. In 1942, when the Germans bombed out an English plant making supersecret sonic submarine detectors, the British Admiralty picked the engineering works of William Gorman, in Toronto, to do the job. Bill Corman picked an unlikely spot: the huge Casa Loma's stables...
...have passed the dreaded limit of "compressibility" when the air streams pass the wing or control surfaces at the speed of sound (TIME, Sept. 23). A "standing sound wave" may have formed, clung like a yammering banshee, and torn the plane to shreds. Perhaps Captain De Havilland crossed that sonic threshold only to discover, in Hamlet's soaring words...
With Asdic the harpoon-gunners hoped to follow a sounding whale on his deep dive under the sea, and to be waiting for him when he came up to blow. But the whales, nimbler than U-boats, dove out of Asdic's sonic beam, and the gunners had to rely, as of old, on their knowledge of whale psychology. Radar was useless for spotting surfaced whales, which gave very poor "pips" on its scope. Even at locating antarctic ice it was none too useful in the hands of the whalers' semi-trained operator...