Word: planets
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...19th-Century stargazer once said that Mercury "seems to exist for no other reason than to throw discredit on astronomers." Last week the little planet (diameter 3,100 miles) was scheduled for a transit across the blazing face of the sun. From complicated formulas and tables, scientists had carefully determined the time. But when astronomers at Mt. Wilson's famed observatory shot the passage with motion-picture film synchronized with a clock, they found Mercury was 30 seconds late for its performance...
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...
...while animators studied their lizardy movements. By the time a complete cast had been rounded up for the Rite, the Disney zoo contained eusthenopterons, brachiosaurs, brontosaurs, plesiosaurs, mesosaurs, diplodocuses, triceratopses, pterodactyls, trachodons, struthiomimuses, stegosaurs, archaeopteryxes, pteranodons, tyrannosaurs and enough plain run-of-the-Jurassic dinosaurs to people a planet. Studio cameras groaned under the burden of the whole story of evolution...
...Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History. But even there, since he is able to poke into all the museum's affairs, from blue whales to green sapphires, he has added a lot of vicarious information to his own experiences. Into his latest book, This Amazing Planet (Putnam; $2), Dr. Andrews has packed this miscellaneous knowledge. The book adds up to a fascinating heap of glorified Ripleyisms, of scientific believe-it-or-nots. Samples...
...Spengler, Edwin Franden Dakin, selected and expounded the most currently relevant 15% of Spengler's text. Today and Destiny ap peals to the U. S.'s weakness for digests. It also appeals to the U. S.'s apprehension for its national future on a quaking planet. Far more than the shrill, prolix nonsense of Mein Kampf (U. S. sales: 197,500), Spengler makes profitable U. S. reading...