Science: What is Summer?

This week, on Sept. 22, the sun reaches the autumnal equinox. At that moment in its apparent southward motion it crosses the celestial equator, stands vertically over the earth's equator. And that moment will be heralded by many a U. S. newspaper as summer's end. Thereupon Physicist William Warner Sleator of the University of Michigan will get mad again.

For a long time 57-year-old Professor Sleator, whose specialties are optics and spectroscopy, has bottled up his irritation when he read glib squibs about spring "beginning" on March 21, or summer "beginning" on June...

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