Word: caltech
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...students must batter a piano into pieces small enough to be passed through a hole in a board 20 cm. (7.87 in.) in diameter. The sport got its start at Britain's Derby College of Technology, where the best time was 14 min. 3 sec. Then, at Caltech, members of the Reduction Study Group claimed the piano-demolition championship by crippling a keyboard in 10 min. 44.4 seconds. But records are made to be broken. Last week students at Detroit's Wayne State University reduced an old fraternity piano into kindling...
Unlike cramming bodies into telephone booths or rotating in Laundromat dryers, piano reduction is supposed to be scientific team tomfoolery with a high purpose. Explained Caltech Piano Reducer Robert W. Diller, head of the team: "Piano reduction has psychological implications which are pretty dear to us. It's a satire on the obsolescence of today's society. We're sending out a brochure to see if we can get competition started all over the world. We'll start with the Paris Conservatoire and the Juilliard School of Music...
Viewed through the far-sighted optical telescopes of modern astronomy, the great spiral galaxies that dot the depths of space look as stable as anything in the universe. But the view may be a cosmic illusion. Astrophysicists Fred Hoyle and William A. Fowler, from Caltech. told the American Physical Society that galaxies often explode with improbable energy. Even the Milky Way Galaxy, of which the earth and the entire solar system are only a tiny part, may have blown up many times already-and could pop off again...
Hoyle and Fowler base their theory on the mysterious double sources of radio energy that radio telescopes have found in the sky. At first those distant transmitters of energy seemed to be associated with nothing at all-at least nothing that could be photographed with optical telescopes. Then Caltech's giant interferometer in Owens Valley (two 90-ft. radio telescopes working in unison) mapped many double sources with unprecedented accuracy. When the new radio map of the sky was superimposed on photographs taken with the 200-in. Palomar telescope, a galaxy was often neatly bracketed between paired spots...
...amount of radio energy from any source is fairly easy to measure, and when Caltech Radio Astronomers P. Maltby. T. A. Matthews and A. T. Moffet com pared this figure with the distance of the associated galaxy,* they got something of a shock. Some of the stronger pairs were emitting 4.4 times 10 ^44 ergs* per second in radio energy, an astonishing figure that represents more than 100 billion times the heat and light energy emitted...