Word: methodical
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...sweeping as the creationists' jihad against Darwin, but it is also far more focused: what is under attack here is not a vast theory with admitted gaps but a specific experiment on a specific piece of cloth--an apparently pure application of the scientific method that the West has taken for granted since the days of the Enlightenment...
...rays, spectroscopy, ultraviolet fluorescence, thermography and chemical analyses. Among the scientists' findings: that the shroud had come into direct contact with a body and that the "blood" on the cloth is probably real blood. The figure itself bears no telltale brushstrokes and seems have been rendered by no artistic method either of the Middle Ages or of Jesus' time. Publicized by a spate of books, the 1978 findings exposed more people to the shroud than had ever thought of it before--and convinced a hefty portion of them that it was indeed Christ's burial sheet. That is, until...
...experts. Contradicting Adler, he maintains, "We stayed away from charring and what might have been charred." Beyond that, the samples were cleaned both mechanically and chemically to rid them of contaminants. In fact, charring per se does not alter an object's carbon 14 ratio: scientists routinely use the method to date pieces of charcoal...
While Smiley's straightforward style may not be the best method of recounting the almost overwhelming challenges that Lidie faces (both physically and mentally), it keeps the book feeling genuine, and never once lets it digress into a cheap Western adventure-romance dime novel. The author relies a bit too heavily on powers of description, with enormous paragraphs dedicated to describing the finery (or lack thereof) around the heroine. But then again, such descriptions keep the authenticity of the book alive...
Gandhian nonviolence is widely believed to be the method by which India gained independence. (The view is assiduously fostered inside India as well as outside it.) Yet the Indian revolution did indeed become violent, and this violence so disappointed Gandhi that he stayed away from the independence celebrations in protest. Moreover, the ruinous economic impact of World War II on Britain, and--as British writer Patrick French says in his book Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division--the gradual collapse of the Raj's bureaucratic hold over India from the mid-'30s onward did as much...