Word: powers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that developer in the cafeteria, "Joel Klein" is a symbol more than a person. He is the personification of arrogance and unreason, and of a powerful institution that is misusing its power. Klein and Attorney General Janet Reno and the DOJ, in other words, are regarded in Redmond as cartoon figures, rather like the image of Gates and Microsoft projected by rivals and echoed in the antitrust suit. Each side holds this cartoon view of the other but cannot fathom why anyone would hold such a cartoon view...
...Gets Girl, having its premiere at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, eases us so skillfully into an utterly recognizable world--Theresa is a single magazine editor whose (largely arid) love life is the object of curiosity to friends and co-workers alike--that its unraveling grabs us with special power. Tony, the good-looking but rather clueless date, won't stop calling. He shows up unannounced in her office. There are signs he's watching her apartment. Soon Theresa has a stalker on her hands. And we have one of the finest, most disturbing American plays in years...
HORGAN: My faith is based on common sense, Paul, and on science itself. As science advances, it imposes limits on its own power. Relativity theory prohibits faster-than-light travel or communication. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory constrain our predictive abilities. Science's limits are glaringly obvious in particle physics, which, as Steven Weinberg describes [in the Visions issue], seeks a "theory of everything" that will explain the origin of matter, energy and even space and time. The leading theory postulates that reality arises from infinitesimal "strings" wriggling in a hyperspace of 10 (or more) dimensions. Unfortunately, these hypothetical strings...
HOFFMAN: Yes, but who is to say that all these scientific theories won't ultimately be replaced by ones with greater explanatory power? Galileo and Newton thought their laws of motion were the cat's pajamas, explaining everything under the sun and many things beyond, but 2 1/2 centuries later a Swiss patent clerk toppled their notions of space and time. Obviously, Galileo and Newton did not foresee what Einstein found. I think it's ahistorical to assert that in the future there will never be an Einstein of, say, the mind who will be able to pull together...
...singular convergence of social, intellectual and political factors. If you accept this, then the only question is when, not if, science will reach its limits. The American historian Henry Adams observed almost a century ago that science accelerates through a positive-feedback effect. Knowledge begets more knowledge; power begets more power. This so-called acceleration principle has an intriguing corollary: If science has limits, then it might be moving at maximum speed just before it hits the wall...