Unit 4: Vocabulary from Readings

I once had occasion to testify before the United States Senate Space and Aeronautics Committee on the scientific background of the space program; my talk dealt with the manner in which all substances in the universe are assembled out of neutrons, protons, and electrons as the basic building blocks.

The existence of the electron was not proved conclusively by any single one of these experiments.

By applying an electrical force to the droplets and studying their motions in response to this force, he could deduce the amount of electric charge carried by the electrons on each droplet.

The electrons form a diffuse shell around the nucleus, marking the outer boundary of the atom.

An orange, a few grains of sand some feet away, and then some cherry pits circling slowly around the orange at a distance of a city block. Two thousand miles away is another orange, perhaps with a few specks of planetary matter circling around it. That is the void of space.

For example, the day I returned to Moscow from Muynak, my friend Alexei Yablokov, possibly the leading environmentalist in the Soviet Union, was returning from an emergency expedition to the White Sea, where he had investigated the mysterious and unprecedented death of several million starfish, washed up into a knee-deep mass covering many miles of beach.

This same phenomenon may also explain the sudden increase in dolphin deaths along the Gulf Coast in Texas as well as the mysterious deaths of 12,000 seals whose corpses washed up on the shores of the North Sea in the summer of 1988.

We ignore these losses at our peril, however.

Much of the ice on the continent of Antarctica is actually a form of consolidated snow called firn.

As the icebergs drift, the seawater erodes them from below, until the berg abruptly topples over and continues its journey upside down.

As the water on the surface cools, it begins to condense, and individual ice crystals act as seeds, causing the water to congeal around them, squeezing the salt out into the water below.

The circumstances were dire, to say the least.

To the best of Shackleton’s knowledge, there was a cache of stores in a hut on Paulet Island from a 1902 Swedish expedition.