Word: presenters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...understand consciousness, however. We probably already know all the fundamental physics we need for these tasks. The branch of science in which a final theory is likely to have its greatest impact is cosmology. We have pretty good confidence in the ability of the standard model to trace the present expansion of the universe back to about a billionth of a second after its start...
...when we try to understand what happened earlier than that, we run into the limitations of the model, especially its silence on the behavior of gravitation at very short distances. The final theory will let us answer the deepest questions of cosmology: Was there a beginning to the present expansion of the universe? What determined the conditions at the beginning? And is what we call our universe, the expanding cloud of matter and radiation extending billions of light-years in all directions, really all there is, or is it only one part of a much larger universe in which...
...this context of accepted scientific procedures, single occurrences present a knotty problem. Their "truth" cannot be denied, but how can we use their existence to assert any generality rather than an explanation for a singular circumstance? For specific events of history--the rise, domination and extinction of dinosaurs, for example--we seek no such generality, and specific narrations for bounded events supply the explanations we seek. Thus a particular asteroid, striking the earth 65 million years ago and leaving evidence of its impact off the Yucatan Peninsula, probably triggered a global extinction that sealed the fate of dinosaurs and many...
...complex that scientists are struggling to understand them. Climatologist Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for one, fervently believes the answer to our problems lies not just in improved knowledge of the climate system but in technological advances that could counter--and perhaps reverse--present trends. In other words, the farfetched dreams that prominent scientists like Von Neumann once harbored have not died. Rather they have been transformed and, in the process, become more urgent...
This is not the "banality of evil," as Hannah Arendt described Eichmann's bureaucratic Final Solution. The photographs present, rather, a sort of festivity of evil. Well dressed white people - the men in jaunty straw boaters, the women in pretty Sunday dresses, the children (children!) neat as a pin - are posed as they inspect mutilated and naked black corpses. People have brought picnic baskets. The pictures were sent as postcards through the mail...