Word: angular
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...incredibly poky and protracted; it just won't keep movin' along. Nor has it very much more of musicomedy's factitious lure than of the old Hudson River Valley's drowsy charm; only here & there is a lyric sprightly, or the dancing gay. As Ichabod, angular Gil Lamb is likable and pleasant, but by no means a tide-turner. Best thing about Sleepy Hollow is the singing, which does a lot for the next best thing-the songs...
...planets, for instance, revolve in the same direction and in almost the same plane. The four inner ones (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) are smaller and denser than the outer ones (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune). Perhaps the most remarkable peculiarity is that the outer planets possess almost all the "angular momentum" (energy of rotation) in the system. Any satisfactory theory of the solar system's origin must account for these "regularities...
...University sums up the more recent theories. He rules out all theories based on a collision, or near-collision, between the sun and another star. A string of planets drawn out of the sun in this way could not have so large a part of the system's angular momentum. The recent theory of Harvard's Dr. Fred L. Whipple (that the sun and the planets were formed at the same time out of a cloud of mixed gas and smoke particles) is hardly better, says Dr. ter Haar. It accounts for the distribution of the angular momentum...
...Haar prefers his own modification of one of the earliest modern theories, originally proposed by Immanuel Kant in 1755. Kant suggested that the planets condensed gradually from a gaseous envelope surrounding the sun. Later cosmogonists discarded this theory mostly because it did not account for the greater angular momentum of the outer planets. But Dr. ter Haar believes that all Kant needs is a little tinkering...
...center the gas was dense enough to be somewhat viscous. Its drag gradually slowed the rotation of the sun while the outer parts of the disc revolved faster. This slowing effect, thinks ter Haar, points toward an explanation of the uneven distribution of the solar system's angular momentum...