Word: weightlessness
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...carried a memory of his homeland through a life of wanderings. He came to Paris in 1910, lived through both prewar cubism and postwar surrealism, took something from both, was captured by neither. Instead, he clung to his own haunting evocations of nameless gaiety and wistful sadness, in a weightless world of objects flung aloft by some superhuman juggler and suspended in midair. Many of his themes derive from the Russian folk tales and Jewish rituals of his youth, still more from his happy marriage with his late wife Bella, whose image in bridal white or sensual black hovered across...
...this piece is especially interesting, since he changes it sharply at the climax, switching from a rambling impressionistic picture to sharp realistic prose. This method is well meant, but I think it tends to weaken the story structurally. The impressionism overbalances the beginning, making the conclusion, in contrast, almost weightless. But outside of this stylistic contention, I can only praise Stewart's sensitive and thoughtful treatment of a difficult plot...
...empty space approaches, the travelers will face a new difficulty, never before experienced by human beings. The earth's gravitational field still pulls at a space ship, but as soon as the craft is no longer supported by the air, its occupants feel no gravitation. They become weightless. In the comics they float around merrily, enjoying their new freedom, but in sober fact they will probably behave like stumbling idiots. The human body's sense-organs that control balance and muscular action need gravity to guide them. The crewmen of space ships will need a lot of training...
Electronic engineers loathe mechanical moving parts. One that has always bothered them is the light, vibrating diaphragm in the throat of a loudspeaker. Compared to the almost weightless electrons that flash through radio tubes, the loudspeaker membranes are sluggish. Their slow and clumsy response distorts the delicate signals brought to them by the electrons; the ordinary mechanical loudspeakers cannot reproduce the full range of music or the human voice. The ideal loudspeaker, the engineers have long believed, should have a diaphragm almost as weightless as the electrons themselves...
From the Air Force's department of space medicine, Dr. Heinz Haber spoke up. Said he: "The weightless condition to which a space pilot would be subjected ... is not going to influence breathing or circulation noticeably-it is the nervous system that needs watching...