Word: sonically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...honorable American pasttime. One of the most active current crusaders on this front is William A. Shurcliffe, whose role at Harvard is senior research assistant at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, but whom Congressmen and airplane builders know better as the muckraking director of the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom...
...most obvious objection to SSTs is that they cause sonic booms. The problem, as Boeing engineers and the Air Force know so well, is inherent: since the SSTs' only virtue is their ability to go faster than subsonic planes, and since the increased speed inevitably means creation of a boom, there's no way to get rid of the problem while keeping the SSTs' benefits. After pointing this out (in a chapter puckishly called "Is there a cure for the boom?"), Shurcliffe tells why booms from...
Shurcliffe then moves on to paint a grim picture of what the real sonic boom would be like. The chapters on "Annoyance and Injury to People" conjures up visions of light sleepers being rousted from their beds by sudden booms and surgeons making tragic blunders when boomed at the operating table. There are statements from newspapers telling about deaths from sonic booms, and even psychologists' analyses of the "irritation and frustration, as well as dramatic declines in work efficiency" that chronic booming would produce...
...then there is the physical damage sonic booms may cause. The "Disasters caused by sonic booms" tells of some of the famous boom catastrophes. Shurcliffe has a knack for the cute story, and his most picturesque tale here is of the Air Force official whose speech minimizing sonic boom problems was interrupted by a sonic boom that blew out windows all around...
...anywhere as precise as what the economists have for the economic system." Nor do the social scientists have a measurement for social values akin to the dollar, although one possible theoretical unit is called the "utile," used by economists to weigh the price people would pay to avoid the sonic boom of an SST, for example, as against the economic benefits that the plane would give them...