What is "cross sections"

Usage examples of "cross sections".

And so he worked on, trying to incorporate into the calculation skylight radiance intensities, Chandrasekhar's radiative transfer equation, chromaticity scales, aerosol chemical compositions, Le-gendre polynomials to evaluate the angular scattering intensities, Riccati-Bessel functions to evaluate the scattering cross sections, and so on-occupying the better part of the drive to Arena Glacier, concentrating hard and steadfastly ignoring the world around him and the situation in which he now found himself.

And when we look down at Earth, we see cross sections of the Earth.

I was seeing cross sections of my body, and I saw a whole lot of different spheres that must have been sections of this hypersphere.

Thus the cable should be thickest at geosynchronous height, and taper to thinner cross sections all the way down to the ground.

By the time the beam spreads much beyond that, any civilization that's searching for intelligent signals starts getting smaller and smaller cross sections of the Message.