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Halley's comet

(Encyclopedia)Halley's comet or Comet Halley hălˈē, hāˈlē [key], periodic comet named for Edmond Halley, who observed it in 1682 and identified it as the one observed in 1531 and 1607. Halley did not live to ...

Alamogordo

(Encyclopedia)Alamogordo ălˌəməgôrˈdō, –də [key], city, seat of Otero co., S N.Mex., near the Sacramento Mts.; inc. 1912. Holloman Air Force Base, home to U.S. stealth aircraf...

reconnaissance satellite

(Encyclopedia)reconnaissance satellite, artificial satellite launched by a country to provide intelligence information on the military activities of foreign countries. There are four major types. Early-warning sate...

Bentley, Arthur Fisher

(Encyclopedia)Bentley, Arthur Fisher, 1870–1957, American political scientist and philosopher, b. Freeport, Ill., studied Johns Hopkins (B.A., 1892; Ph.D., 1895) and Univ. of Berlin. After a year teaching at the ...

perspective

(Encyclopedia)perspective, in art, any method employed to represent three-dimensional space on a flat surface or in relief sculpture. Although many periods in art showed some progressive diminution of objects seen ...

Sloane, T(homas) O'Conor

(Encyclopedia)Sloane, T(homas) O'Conor, 1851–1940, American scientist, lecturer, writer, and periodical editor, Ph.D. Columbia, 1876. Sloane was a member of the editorial staff of the Scientific American, where h...

vaporization

(Encyclopedia)vaporization, change of a liquid or solid substance to a gas or vapor. There is fundamentally no difference between the terms gas and vapor, but gas is used commonly to describe a substance that appea...

Air Force, United States Department of the

(Encyclopedia)Air Force, United States Department of the, military department within the U.S. Dept. of Defense (see Defense, United States Department of). The Air Force traces its roots to the founding of the Aeron...

cosmology

(Encyclopedia)cosmology, area of science that aims at a comprehensive theory of the structure and evolution of the entire physical universe. The earliest pre-Ptolemaic theories assumed that the earth was the cent...

Merton, Robert King

(Encyclopedia)Merton, Robert King, 1910–2003, American sociologist, b. Philadelphia as Meyer Schkolnick, grad. Temple Univ. (A.B., 1931) and Harvard (M.A., 1932; Ph.D., 1936). From 1941 on he was a professor of s...