Word: planets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...atomic piles at work, such put-it-off-till-tomorrow methods may have to be abandoned. Dr. Morgan, keeping a fairly straight face, mentioned a definitive solution: why not concentrate the deadly isotopes into one big lot, load them into high-powered rockets, and-aiming at no particular friendly planet-shoot them off the earth into space...
Astronomers throughout most of the world got that frustrated feeling last week over a bit of news that plodded, with maddening deliberation, out of Russia. According to V. O. Fesenkov, chairman of the Meteorite Committee of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Science, a ""minor planet" landed on eastern Siberia last Feb. 12. The fragments of iron, nickel and cobalt were said to have smashed through the soil, penetrated the bedrock, and left several dozen craters-the biggest one 75 feet in diameter...
What hit Siberia was probably a wandering meteorite, rather than a "minor planet" belonging to the sun's very orderly family. If it had fallen anywhere else, the world's astronomers would have pounced on it before the crater was cold. They could only hope that Soviet scientists were making accurate, if tardy observations...
There are advantages though. Astronomy "gets you away from this puny planet and gives you a concept of the vastness of the universe and the seeming endlessness of time," as Professor Monzel explains it. And there is no such thing as an unemployed astronomer. It is a choice which the undergraduate in search of a field of concentration must make after weighing both sides carefully--because on the other side of the fence, one thing is certain; 'you cannot major in Astronomy and still be a practical playboy...
Sharing the platform with Henry A. Wallace and Elliott Roosevelt, Professor Shapley declared that "hiding under our natural national sympathy for the hungry Greeks, without consulting us, our government sets out to capitalize the planet, without finding out if all sections of the planet want to experience our types of freedom...