Word: whirligig
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...billionth of a billionth of a second-or just long enough to travel a few widths of an atomic nucleus at the speed of light. But its discovery carries the curious and unpredictable importance of all successful basic research. Now there is a little less strangeness in the whirligig, subatomic world...
...clash of two cliques down at the foundation! Herrick-man of both sensitivity and substance-is in a Nixonian crisis or worse, and it causes his whole life to pass before his eyes. The process requires 784 pages, a great deal of recollection-in-miniature, and a wearisome whirligig of literary techniques that makes this long novel seem all the longer...
...Greeks conceived the idea of the atom, and over the centuries it made the nature of matter seem a nice, simple thing. Modern physicists opened the nucleus of the atom, and the whirligig inside opened up a new and wonderful world. But man continues attempts to explain the universe as the harmony envisioned by the Greeks. Einstein thought he could, but never found a way to put his unified field theory to a test. Last week two new and impressive efforts toward harmony were announced in Manhattan and West Berlin. See SCIENCE, "Assumptions of Symmetry...
...International Amateur Athletic Federation slapped a ban on the Spanish whirligig style of javelin throwing, which had been producing phenomenal results all over Europe (TIME, Oct. 29), by adding a sentence to the javelin-throwing rules: "At no time after preparing to throw, until the javelin has been discharged into the air, may the competitor turn completely around so that his back is toward the throwing...
FOREIGN SCULPTURE: U.S. Abstractionist Alexander Calder (TIME, Jan. 8, 1951), whose whirligig mobiles fascinated both judges and visitors...