Word: waves
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...carnage also showed that the entire region is growing dangerously impatient with the political stalemate. The shock wave spread to Jordan, where a Palestinian attacked a busload of tourists, wounding ten, and four Palestinians died after thousands took to the streets in the worst rioting since April 1989, threatening King Hussein's grip on the troubled kingdom. In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak warned that settlement of Soviet Jews in the disputed territories threatened "to put the whole region on the verge of a new bloody confrontation...
...scientists are suddenly optimistic about finding this missing link in Einstein's theory. A new facility called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), planned for completion in 1995, could provide the first direct evidence that gravity waves exist. The $192 million project recently got a thumbs-up from President George Bush, who asked Congress for $47 million in start-up funding as part of his proposed 1991 budget. The search for a suitable site has already begun...
LIGO will be 100 to 1,000 times as sensitive as existing gravity-wave detectors. That should be enough not only to confirm relativity but also to probe deeply into the most violent processes in the cosmos, including ) exploding supernovas, collisions between black holes, and "starquakes" on the semisolid surfaces of neutron stars. All of these phenomena are believed to send out characteristic bursts of gravity waves. Says Rochus Vogt, the Caltech physics professor who heads the joint M.I.T.-Caltech team that will build LIGO: "We are going to look at a whole new force as a transmitter of signals...
While the two LIGO installations by themselves will enable scientists to tune in to heavenly disasters, the addition of two more facilities would make it possible to determine the precise locations of the events. Says Vogt: "There are proposals pending to build gravity-wave observatories in Europe and Australia, and we're hoping to put together an international network." That will take time, and some of the most important discoveries lie years in the future. But just as Galileo did with his crude telescope in the early 1600s, the first generation of gravity-wave astronomers will undoubtedly learn things right...
CAPTION: CATCHING A WAVE...