Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Einstein taught the greatest humility of all: that we are but a speck in an unfathomably large universe. The more we gain insight into its mysterious forces, cosmic and atomic, the more reason we have to be humble. And the more we harness the huge power of these forces, the more such humility becomes an imperative. "A spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe," he once wrote, "in the face of which we, with our modest powers, must feel humble...
Einstein could never accept that the universe was at its heart a cosmic crapshoot, so that today his papers on unified field theory seem hopelessly archaic. But the puzzle they tried to solve is utterly fundamental. In simply recognizing the problem, Einstein was so daringly far-sighted that only now has the rest of physics begun to catch up. A new generation of physicists has at last taken on the challenge of creating a complete theory--one capable of explaining, in Einstein's words, "every element of the physical reality." And judging from the progress they have made, the next...
...where does this cosmic perspective leave us? Inspired? Depressed? As helpless in the face of technology's onslaught as ever...
This aura of inexorability has led some people to wax poetic about cosmic purpose. The Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing at midcentury, long before the Internet, nonetheless discerned a "thinking envelope of the earth" that he dubbed the "noosphere." This was the divinely ordained outcome of the two evolutions, and would lead to "Point Omega," where brotherly love would reign supreme...
...different groups. Says Greenwich observatory director Kristen Lippencott, who put together the British exhibition: "Time is not the thing on our wrists. Time is a cultural object." For many outside the Western European tradition, for instance, time is a circle that turns on a daily, yearly and even a cosmic scale. The Hindu concept of reincarnation is perhaps the most familiar example, but the Hopi in the American Southwest and the Inuit in the Arctic also look at the world as a series of repeating cycles with no beginning or end; so, traditionally, did the Chinese and Japanese cultures...