Word: sonically
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...months ago, a Harvard physicist named William Shurcliff organized a few friends into the Citizens' League Against the Sonic Boom. The group's members--all nine of them--had the unlikely goal of stopping the development and production of the most mammoth project in commercial aviation history, the multi-billion dollar supersonic transport...
...League's basic objection to the supersonic transport (SST), and the one it emphasizes most, is the sonic boom. A sonic boom is the shock wave created by an object flying faster than the speed of sound. The sharp explosive sound is pushed along in front of the object for as long as the supersonic flight lasts. At 1800 miles per hour, or about two and one-half times the speed of sound, the SST would leave behind a 50-mile-wide "bang zone," affecting perhaps five million people on a single flight across...
...making every house along the boom path seem "next door to a jet airport"--only worse. The sound of an arriving jet (all commercial jets fly below the speed of sound) builds up gradually, so at the peak of the noise there is no element of surprise. But a sonic boom provides no warning, and Shurcliff thinks that it is the boom's startling effect, even more than the noise itself, which makes it intolerable...
...crashed in June 1966 after Test Pilot Joe Walker's F-104 Starfighter jet brushed the giant plane's wing, then tore through a rudder during a publicity flight. Since then, tests of XB-70 No. 1 have contributed aerodynamic and thermodynamic knowledge, including studies of the sonic-boom problem that are being used in the development of such heavyweight transports...
...many respects When She Was Good represents a departure about as shaking as a sonic boom. Philip Roth repeats some of his old themes, but his story is about Lucy, a Midwestern girl living in a small Midwestern town. Horrified by her drunken father, she rejects completely, literally and figuratively sending him to jail. And she adopts rigidly moral ideas about her own life. By being "good" she manages to destroy everything she touches and, eventually, to kill herself while pregnant with the child she conceived to force her husband into a sense of responsibility...