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Perhaps Marshall’s most striking habit was his insistence on leaving the office each day at 5:30 p.m. In an age before cell phones and email, Marshall didn’t put in a second shift late into the night once he got home. Having experienced burnout earlier in his career, he felt it was important to relax in the evening. “A man who worked himself to tatters on minor details had no ability to handle the more vital issues of war,” he once said.
A World Without Email
Cal Newport
But Zwicky was also capable of insights of the most startling brilliance. In the early 1930s, he turned his attention to a question that had long troubled astronomers: the appearance in the sky of occasional unexplained points of light, new stars. Improbably he wondered if the neutron—the subatomic particle that had just been discovered in England by James Chadwick, and was thus both novel and rather fashionable—might be at the heart of things. It occurred to him that if a star collapsed to the sort of densities found in the core of atoms, the result would be an unimaginably compacted core. Atoms would literally be crushed together, their electrons forced into the nucleus, forming neutrons. You would have a neutron star. Imagine a million really weighty cannonballs squeezed down to the size of a marble and—well, you're still not even close. The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds. A spoonful! But there was more. Zwicky realized that after the collapse of such a star there would be a huge amount of energy left over—enough to make the biggest bang in the universe. He called these resultant explosions supernovae. They would be—they are—the biggest events in creation.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Their proposal, derived from seismic data, recognized that the subduction of lithospheric plates was far more varied than people had supposed. Not only did ocean floor dive under continents but also—and much more commonly—it dived under other ocean floor, like two carpets overlapping. The lower slab, after melting, rose through the upper one as a volcanic-island arc. Now the island arc begins to move with the plate on which it rests. Plate motions shift. New trenches form. In back-arc basins, new ocean crust is made. Some island arcs go in one direction for a while and then reverse themselves. They choke a trench, say, and then go the other way, eating up their own crust as they go. Some of the crust might get emplaced as an ophiolite. The Marianas back-arc basin is spreading now, and so is the Lau-Havre Basin behind the Tonga-Kermadec arc, and so is the basin behind the South Sandwich Islands. Between Indonesia and the Philippines are two trenches that are eating their way toward each other and if nothing stops them will destroy each other. Some people—Moores among them—think that in similar fashion off Jurassic California two trenches were active simultaneously, the easterly one dipping to the east and the westerly one dipping west, and both were destroyed during the Smartville emplacement. In Geology for December, 1983, the volcanologist Alex McBirney, after dealing with the increasingly complicated attempts to relate igneous rocks to plate tectonics, closed with a vision of the decade to come. He said, “I predict that our present confusion about igneous rocks will rise to undreamed-of levels of sophistication.”
Assembling California
John McPhee
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