Word: weightlessness
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...Architect Saarinen took the wraps off a slum clearance project that he has been coaxing along secretly for four years at his Bloomfield Hills, Mich, office (TIME, July 2). His solution: a revolutionary design for one-legged, pedestal-based chairs, dining tables and coffee tables that have all the weightless elegance of a stemmed wineglass...
...artificial satellite on an orbit around the earth is in "free fall." So is a rocket cruising through space with its motor cold. People on board a satellite or rocket would feel weightless, and space medicine experts have long feared that unaccustomed freedom from gravitation will upset human organs or nerves...
...Weightlessness is easy to achieve on earth, but only for short intervals. The simplest way is to jump off something, even a chair. While the jumper is in free fall, his body as a whole is pulled by the earth's gravitation, but the parts of his body feel weightless. In the same way a person in a rapidly descending elevator feels his stomach rise. Actually it does rise: the elevator's fall has made the stomach lose weight, and the elastic tissues that support it have pulled it upward. When the elevator stops descending, gravity resumes control...
...better system is to fly an airplane over a curved course in a part of a gentle outside loop. If the speed and sharpness of the curve are correct, centrifugal force exactly balances the earth's gravitation. Everything in the airplane, including the pilot, suddenly becomes weightless...
...International Astronautical Congress at Rome, Dr. Siegfried J. Gerathewohl of the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine told about experiments with weightlessness made with a two-place, T-33 jet-trainer, which by flying the proper curve at high speed could keep its occupants weightless for 40 seconds at a time...