Word: beaming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other new insights into historic works were all gained with the help of an aging machine located in a bunker-like structure on the campus of the University of California at Davis. It is a refurbished cyclotron, an early model particle accelerator that is able to crank a circulating beam of protons up to velocities as high as one-third the speed of light. By focusing the penetrating but low-intensity beam on the documents and then analyzing the spray of the X rays emitted when the protons collide with atoms in the target, Historian Richard Schwab and Physicist Thomas...
Borrowing two of the world's 49 remaining volumes of the Gutenberg Bible, leaves from the 36-line Bible and the Sibyllenbuch fragment, the Davis team exposed them, one at a time, to the proton beam. The results of those tests, begun in 1982, are still being evaluated, but most of the doubts about Gutenberg's role have vanished. The Davis tests established that instead of carbon-based ink, the German printer employed a slurry of copper and lead for his famous Bible. Printed characters in both of the 36-line works, the X-ray patterns showed, consisted...
Last year the Davis team persuaded Yale University, which owns the controversial Vinland map, to fly it to Davis, where it was subjected to the proton beam. The map, supposedly dating to around 1440, created a sensation when it was revealed in 1965 because it showed part of North America, labeled VINLANDA INSULA. It seemed to be the first cartographic evidence that Europeans had visited the continent before the time of Columbus. In 1974, however, some particles of ink from the map were found to be titanium-based. This meant, experts said, that the ink was of 20th century vintage...
Mies, meanwhile, was taking the logic of the empty architectural box to its unnatural extreme in the U.S. His campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology is a grove of steel ectoskeletons, essentially giant one-room buildings. The Farnsworth House (1951), a planar H-beam box floating over a floodplain outside Chicago, was Mies' last modest building, and the most affectingly American one. (Alas, his project for an Indiana fast-food stand never got built.) Farnsworth looks like a house, just barely. After it came almost nothing but true Miesian "universal space": high-rises, modeled on his twin apartment slabs...
...started looking into these laser-beam things and stuff like that, but the research wasn't very promising. Well, I was having lunch with a few of the guys from the military-industrial complex last week and said, "C'mon, how hard can this thing be? You have a missile travelling six miles per second up there. Anything you throw at it is going to do some damage." Then the idea...