Word: sonics
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Like hundreds of other U.S. towns, Deerfield has become an unwilling part of a supersonic age. Jets from Westover Air Force Base, 25 miles to the south, blur past overhead-and lower the sonic boom on peaceful Deerfield. "Why can't they go out over the ocean if they want to break the sound barrier?" asks a local schoolteacher. His complaint is as familiar on the West Coast as on the East. And in the last three years, more than 1,000 civilian damage claims, seeking more than $500,000, have been filed against...
...nothing more than the point at which the noise is turned on. Air is a fluid, and, above the speed of sound (about 760 m.p.h.), it reacts much like the surface of a lake when a speedboat rips across it: waves go out and roll toward land. The sonic boom occurs when the shock wave from a jet hits the nearby ground. It follows the plane wherever it goes, and the pressure may make a sound equal to ten thunderclaps...
...nerves, a webwork of highways that crisscross for 220,000 miles in all directions, including ever-higher altitudes. Moreover, the dawn of the commercial jet age - with 94 jet transports already in U.S. airline service, and about 150 more due by year's end - with its near sonic speeds and bigger loads, has compounded all of the vast problems of the Air Age with unparalleled force...
...accepted invitations from the Air Defense Command to witness an interceptor missile shoot called Project William Tell II at Tyndall Air Force Base (near Panama City, Fla.)-and, incidentally, to absorb some good-natured press-agentry that would help still public complaints over loud jet noises and chimney-rattling sonic booms...
...Acoustica's experiment. But why talk about it? One good reason is that as early as 1952 Russian Physicist P. M. Kubanski started publishing scientific papers about the effect of sound waves on heat transfer. There is at least a chance that the Russians are already using sonic controls in some of their rockets-and that in turn might explain how they got those giant Sputniks in orbit...