West Side Story has long been important in the international market. This chapter provides four vignettes of its presence outside of the United States. Attempts to make the show one of the pieces of American culture that the US State Department allowed to tour in the USSR in the 1950s were unsuccessful, but the 1961 film helped make West Side Story known there and its sense of integration between various elements aligned closely with Soviet artistic conceptions. The film became very popular in Spain, where staged versions did not appear until tours in the 1980s. The first two professional Spanish productions premiered in Barcelona in 1996 and Madrid in 2018. Jerome Robbins took an American cast to England in 1958, creating a sensation first in Manchester and then in London. A Finnish production in Tampere Theater in 1963 proved popular and played briefly in Vienna in 1965.

With the large ring laser gyros for the geosciences, we enter the extreme high resolution regime of rotation sensing, observing rotation rates of less than 1 picoradian/s. This requires us to look closely at all potential noise sources in the ring laser itself, as well as in the data acquisition process. Our ring laser measurements for space geodesy are also based on ancillary sensors, such as high resolution tiltmeters, ambient pressure sensors, thermometers and an optical frequency comb for the stabilization of the laser frequency. This chapter discusses the required performance of the detection system together with the performance of the ancillary sensors. We also have to examine the reliability of our numerical algorithms, like frequency estimators, both in the time and frequency domains. With everything included and tested, observations of polar motion, solid Earth tides, ocean loading and the Chandler motion are now possible.

This chapter discusses the design properties and operational practices of the helium–neon ring laser gyroscope in fine detail. We look atmonolithic ring laser design and explore the advantage of upscaling, which eventually necessitates a heterolithic cavity structure. This requires us to revisit the scale factor stability, beam wander and strain effects. Topics like backscatter correction, sensor sensitivity and a variety of different operation modes, such as single laser mode or the mode-locked regime, are presented and critically discussed. The mitigation of all sorts of obvious and also a large number of unsuspected ring laser error sources is intensively treated and illustrated with a rich body of measurement examples, before the importance and limitations of the cavity mirrors is addressed. This leads us to explore several alternative transitions of neon, before the design and realization of large sensor arrays is described. With the realization of the ROMY ring laser array in the shape of a tetrahedron, we have recovered the full Earth rotation vector. Furthermore, ROMY is also the first six degree of freedom sensor for teleseismic events.