Word: andromeda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Brian Yates points to the dark sky, hardly able to contain himself as he recites the names of the stars and the planets. Over there is Andromeda, the chained lady. There's Pegasus, the winged horse--and the Northern Cross, Vega and Jupiter! "Get over it, Yates," yells one of the students who, for 50 extra-credit points, have come to the playground to watch the moon rise. "Never," replies Yates...
Hubble wasn't so sure. And in 1924, three years after Shapley departed to take over the Harvard Observatory, Hubble found proof to the contrary. Spotting a Cepheid variable star in the Andromeda nebula, Hubble used Shapley's technique to show that the nebula was nearly a million light-years away, far beyond the bounds of the Milky Way. It's now known to be the full-fledged galaxy closest to our own in a universe that contains tens of billions of galaxies. "I do not know," Shapley wrote Hubble in a letter quoted by biographer Christianson, "whether...
...HAVE BEEN READING BOOKS BY MIchael Crichton [SHOW BUSINESS, Sept. 25] since encountering the first paperback edition of The Andromeda Strain in high school. I have never read Crichton for his characters, and his occasional lack of interest in them is not necessarily a shortcoming. I read Crichton because he is my most reliable guide to areas of cutting-edge technology, foreign culture and intrigue in corporations and courts of law. To acquire this degree of diversity while writing to entertain and inform the general public is a magnificent achievement. DAVID J. SCHOW Los Angeles...
...money, earned by writing a shelf full of novels before he left college. Eight were paperback adventure novels written under the name John Lange, one was an Edgar Award-winning medical-detective paperback under the name Jeffrey Hudson, and another was the hardcover breakthrough under his own name, The Andromeda Strain, which was published as he worked out a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He says he produced 10,000 words a day during those years, and no one who knows his work habits disputes...
Michael Crichton didn't really have to get the science right to make sure The Lost World would be a best seller. But he got the science right anyway. Like many of his earlier novels--from The Andromeda Strain, his killer-bacteria thriller that prefigured The Hot Zone by 25 years, to Jurassic Park--The Lost World is suffused with scientific detail that has clearly been lifted from the latest research journals. Yet as a novelist Crichton isn't bound by the usual caveats that academics are forced to issue; he can and does take the most speculative of theories...