Word: spectral
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tale of a Spectrum. Minkowski still did not know the distance from earth of the colliding galaxies. Further exposures, up to nine hours long, gave photographs of their spectrum. The familiar spectral lines had shifted far into the red. According to the theory of the expanding universe, a red shift means that the photographed object is moving away from the observer with a speed proportionate to the shift. In this case the galaxies appeared to be receding at the extraordinary speed of 90,000 miles per second-about 46% of the speed of light which, according to Einstein...
...novel progresses. Morgan slowly comes to accept death, while Rebeck once again accepts the fact of life. The plot tends to unravel, rather than unwind, but even the spectral characters are vivid, and their collisions are often touching and funny-particularly when women are involved. Morgan entwines with a shade named Laura, who has left her body behind with relief, while Rebeck meets a sensible Brooklyn widow, who tries to lead him back to reality, if that's what Brooklyn can be called...
...fiction, e.g., Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, are sexless. Even in The Scarlet Letter, the "A" might as well stand for anticlimax, for all passion is spent before the novel begins. Instead of depicting love and marriage, the U.S. writer customarily projects a spectral landscape dominated by death, pursuit and flight. The U.S. novel does not derive its power from skill, according to Fiedler, or from its vaunted realism (from Poe to Nathanael West, it is often surreal), but from something like Jung's "collective unconscious...
Eighteen months ago, when the Mizo Hills burst into spectral bloom, the frightened tribesmen-70% of whom are Christians, mostly Baptist converts-frantically appealed to the Assam state government for help. When the bamboo last bloomed, in 1910-11, and before that in 1860-62, they said, the rats came. Assam's bureaucrats dismissed such prophecies as superstition. But the prophecies have come true: thousands of rats have left the jungle, attacked the clearings, and stripped everything bare. Too late, the state government sent in rat poison; what was not "lost in transit" fell into the hands of profiteers...
These space-age children are taking an experimental science curriculum drawn up by University of California Physicist Robert Karplus, 32, whose specialty is not elementary school teaching but elementary particles. (Sample Karplus research paper: "Spectral Representations in Perturbation Theory-The Vertex Function.") A Vienna-born infant prodigy who could multiply four-digit numbers in his head before he went to first grade, Harvard-trained (Ph.D., 1948) Karplus got to worrying about schools after he became a father (three girls, two boys, a sixth child on the way). Listening to teachers talk about the problems of teaching science, he decided that...