Word: cosmos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...still another reason to be worried. Consider this: We're on the home stretch to the millennium.The end of a century, let alone a millennium, tends to bring forth bursts of energy and confusion. Even in 1990, as the Hubble space telescope peers deeply (sometimes fuzzily) into the cosmos, sliding toward the 20th century's close feels a little like sailing off the edge of the world. No one knows what is beyond...
...that make up its body. Here was an absolutely ordered society whose chief religious rite was human sacrifice -- penitential rituals, on an appalling scale, whose aim was nothing less than to keep reality in motion. The Mesoamericans believed that the world could stop at any moment, that the very cosmos was always on the brink of dissolution, its cycles maintained only by sacrifice. The sun would not rise in the morning over the lakes of Tenochtitlan if it were not refreshed by streams of blood...
LIGO will be 100 to 1,000 times as sensitive as existing gravity-wave detectors. That should be enough not only to confirm relativity but also to probe deeply into the most violent processes in the cosmos, including ) exploding supernovas, collisions between black holes, and "starquakes" on the semisolid surfaces of neutron stars. All of these phenomena are believed to send out characteristic bursts of gravity waves. Says Rochus Vogt, the Caltech physics professor who heads the joint M.I.T.-Caltech team that will build LIGO: "We are going to look at a whole new force as a transmitter of signals...
...their opportunity has come. This week the space shuttle Discovery was scheduled to take off and deliver into earth orbit the Hubble space telescope, a bus-size instrument that will see the cosmos ten times as clearly as any ground-based telescope ever has. Scientists have impatiently awaited the historic launch through three years of delays caused by the shuttle's problems in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion...
...neither prove God nor disprove him, whether he be Einstein's Old One, the architect of the cosmos, or Michelangelo's stern anthropomorphic censor of our morals. Many of us, including clerics of all faiths, think it unlikely that an all-wise creator would choose for himself the male form of a primate so close genetically to a chimpanzee that some taxonomists would include the pair in the same genus...