Word: mirror
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Finally, and most importantly, we've learned that the age of statesmen, if it ever existed, is a long way back in the rear view mirror of American politics. Gone are the days when, in a close and corrupt election, Richard Nixon gracefully conceded the White House to John F. Kennedy's '40 mistresses, Jackie O.'s pillbox hats and J. Edgar Hoover's wiretaps. Instead, we have both campaigns girding themselves up for scorched-earth strategies, in which the fate of the presidency will be decided by poorly punched ballots, recount deadlines and judicial fiat...
...just my remaining parent. Four decades of childhood were also cut loose. Suddenly there were no family members to report to--or rebel against. And that's pretty scary. A new moral dilemma? A question about the stock market? A mature voice of reason? From this point on, the mirror would have to provide answers. Growing up is hard to do, especially when you're scheduled to enter middle...
...nearly a half-century, starting in 1949, the world's most powerful research-quality telescope was the Hale, on Palomar Mountain, in California. Its mirror, 5 m (17 ft.) in diameter, focused more faint starlight than anything else on the planet. But in the past few years, the Hale has been humbled. Here on Mauna Kea alone sit the Subaru telescope (no relation to the car), with a mirror more than 8 m (27 ft.) across; the Gemini North telescope, also topping 8 m; and the kings of the mountain, the twin Keck telescopes, whose light-gathering surfaces...
...While each of these instruments trumps the Hale in light-gathering power, many are poised to outshine even the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been delivering astonishing snapshots of deepest space since it was refurbished in 1993. The orbiting observatory's nearly 2.5-m (8-ft.) mirror isn't all that powerful, but since it floats above Earth's constantly roiling atmosphere, the Hubble has been unrivaled in the sharpness of its images. No more. Using an ingenious technological trick to eliminate atmospheric blur, most of the new telescopes will soon achieve Hubble-quality focus--and even beat it under...
...also been a long time coming. Impressive as the Hale telescope was for its day, it represented a technological dead end. The Hale, like its smaller predecessors, was powered by a mirror that's essentially a huge hockey puck of glass ground into a concave, light-focusing curve on one face and coated with reflective metal. To keep from sagging under its own weight and distorting the curve, the mirror had to be a bulky 26 in. thick, and it weighed 20 tons. That enormous heft called for an even more massive support structure to hold the whole thing...