Word: toward
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Civil rights took a variety of forms this century. Women got the right to vote, gained control over their reproductive life and made strides toward achieving equal status in the workplace. Gays and lesbians gained the right to be proud of who they...
...disobeyed: Nelson Mandela organizing a campaign in 1952 to defy South Africa's "pass laws" by entering white townships, Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus just as Gandhi had on the South African train, the unknown rebel blocking the line of tanks rumbling toward Tiananmen Square, Lech Walesa leading his fellow Polish workers out on strike, the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst launching hunger strikes, American students protesting the Vietnam War by burning their draft cards, and gays and lesbians at Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn resisting a police raid. In the end, they changed...
Einstein's conclusions became known as the special theory of relativity. No matter how fast one is moving toward or away from a source of light, the speed of that light beam will appear the same, a constant 186,000 miles per second. But space and time will appear relative. As a train accelerates to near the speed of light, time on the train will slow down from the perspective of a stationary observer, and the train will get shorter and heavier. O.K., it's not obvious, but that's why we're no Einstein...
...Toward the end of the 19th century scientists believed they were close to a complete description of the universe. They imagined that space was filled everywhere by a continuous medium called the ether. Light rays and radio signals were waves in this ether just as sound is pressure waves in air. All that was needed to complete the theory was careful measurements of the elastic properties of the ether; once they had those nailed down, everything else would fall into place...
...Bang. Some see this as an indication of God's freedom to start the universe off any way God wanted. Others (myself included) feel that the beginning of the universe should be governed by the same laws that hold at all other times. We have made some progress toward this goal, but we don't yet have a complete understanding of the origin of the universe...