Word: faster
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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That first revolution, which began two centuries ago, created the technology of modern life, but at a high cost in hardship and hunger. Some experts see analogous dangers in the robot revolution. If robots can do men's work faster, better and more cheaply, then what will men do? They will be retrained for other things, the robotmakers answer. But by whom, and for what? Almost 20 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano portrayed a future society in which the elite few run the machines while the unemployable majority subsists on handouts in resentful idleness...
...deadliness-but their firepower has always depended on the rapid expansion of exploding gases down a tube, which pushes the bullet forward. The maximum speed such gases-and thus the gun's projectile too -can reach is severely constrained. None of the particles in the gases can travel faster than the speed of sound through the gas, at best about 10 km (6 miles...
More than a century ago, visionaries like Jules Verne were suggesting a better way. A bullet-shaped vehicle, they claimed, could be propelled far faster by using powerful electromagnetic fields. Now, as a result of lab work in the U.S. and abroad, the Vernean scheme shows promise of becoming a practical reality with far-reaching consequences: armor-piercing guns that can puncture the toughest steels, and perhaps a whole new era of space launchers...
...magnetic field by squeezing it with a carefully directed explosive charge, a technology pioneered during nuclear weaponry research. When the gun is fired, the electric surge ignites the near end of an explosive strip placed just on the outside of one of the rails. As the detonation speeds forward, faster than the blink of an eye, it presses one rail against the other, confining the magnetic field between them in an ever smaller space and imparting still greater velocity to plasma and projectile. Teams led by Physicists Ronald Hawke and Max Fowler have fired half-inch projectiles down a railgun...
...They started bringing it down faster, and we just didn't get back on defense. I guess our concentration just broke down," said Boutilier...