Word: spiralling
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Century. "It will outdo in bizarre appearance any other building in the world," was the verdict of one appraising eye. Fiery old (76) Frank Lloyd Wright, the man who designed it, proudly says that it will be the first building ever conceived in the form of a true logarithmic spiral (descending spiral, widest...
...structure will project 24 ft. beyond the ground level building-line. The interior of this huge upended cone will consist of a continuous, gradually rising, gradually widening, ramp picture-gallery ¾ of a mile long. A great glass dome will top the last wide spiral sweep...
Astronomers have observed that galaxies seem to come in four shapes: 1) spherical, 2) elliptical (like an egg), 3) tightly spiral (like a watch spring) and 4) loosely spiral (like a pinwheel). The Milky Way is a pinwheel. Sir James reasoned that a spherical galaxy spinning in space, like a whirling ball of soft butter, must spread out at the edges and flatten in the center and become more & more disk-shaped, thus evolving from a ball to a spiral. Therefore, said he, a sphere must be the first stage in galactic evolution and a spiral the last...
...Professor Shapley has noticed that spiral galaxies have many star clusters and star clouds - a sign of youth, not age. A star cluster, he observed, is unstable. As it rotates, its stars, revolving at various speeds around the cluster's nucleus, are torn apart by "shearing forces" which break up the cluster and disperse the stars evenly through the galaxy...
Shapley further observed that spiral galaxies (especially the Milky Way) have many unstable, relatively short-lived supergiant stars, another sign of immaturity. Because spherical galaxies, on the other hand, have a smooth, stable structure with few star clusters and no supergiants, he concluded that a galaxy evolves from a spiral to a ball, not vice versa...