Word: orbital
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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Transits of Mercury are a means of charting its queerly complicated orbit. The long axis of its elliptical orbit does not stay fixed, but slowly rotates, and the planet's point of nearest approach to the sun shifts each year. Calculations of classical Newtonian gravitation predict some shift, but not nearly so much as that actually observed. In desperation a French astronomer named Leverrier decided that the rest of the shift must be due to an unseen planet even closer to the sun than Mercury. Leverrier called it "Vulcan." He looked long and hard for it. Once a doctor...
Then in 1915 Einstein produced his General Theory of Relativity, a beautiful theoretical concept but, after all, just a theory. Yet the Relativity mathematics was found to predict a shift of Mercury's orbit which was practically the same as the observed shift. This was the first observational prop for Relativity.* So Einstein may have felt a nostalgic glow last week, if anyone remembered to tell him that Mercury was transiting (passing directly between the sun and the earth...
...Orbit. As far south as Ecuador, Hemisphere defense rests chiefly on U. S. shoulders, since both the Caribbean and the Panama Canal are vital to the defense of the continental U. S. Below Ecuador lie countries which have hitherto been out of the active U. S. defense orbit. Peru has an Army of 12,000 men, about 8,000 police and civil guards. The Army was trained by German General Wilhelm Faupel, is highly efficient. The Peruvian Air Force, Italian-trained, has some 80 ships, in poor condition. The Navy has a personnel of 2,500 men aboard two gunboats...
Like the Isthmus Republics and Mexico, embroiled last week in its own election turbulence, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador lie directly within the U. S. orbit and on their friendliness depends the security of the canal...
...last week, India seemed to have quit talking about dominion status as the price of docility. The London Times's Simla correspondent anxiously reported: "An offer of full freedom within the British Commonwealth no longer meets the [Indian National] Congress case, which . . . asks for complete independence outside the orbit of the British Commonwealth...