Word: brownians
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...What is Brownian motion? Who said we should burn with a hard, gemlike flame? How do you translate the phrase comme il faut? Failure to answer questions like these signifies a catastrophic ignorance, according to E.D. Hirsch Jr., a professor of English at the University of Virginia and inventor of the latest intellectual parlor game...
...meant to provoke serious debate. But when it leaves the theoretical and lands on the practical, it executes a pratfall. Hirsch and two academic colleagues offer a 64-page appendix of references that constitutes their version of vital information. They never do get around to telling the reader that Brownian motion is a random movement of microscopic particles suspended in liquids or gases, that Walter Pater said we should burn with a hard gemlike flame and that comme il faut means proper. They are too busy moving their curriculum between the trendy and the arbitrary. Why, for example, is Sartre...
...Brownian Motion...
...series of afflicted towns-people visits Khlestakov, and on a dimly lit stage two women plead for his assistance in tedious, unexpectedly serious tones. It seems like a screwed-up bit of pacing. But then a macabre, unforgettable vision appears: a group of eerie, frazzled black scarecrows in a Brownian movement behind the transparent plastic sheet that forms the stage's rear boundary, staring at Khlestakov like a second, ghostly audience. In his impenetrable complacency, he can ignore them with a wave of his hand. But if the audience on the other side is to respect itself any more than...
Before the scientific world could even begin to digest these assertions, the journal published still another communique from the young patent examiner. Einstein had devised an equation that accounted for Brownian motion, the random, zigzagging movements of microscopic particles within liquids (named after the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, who first observed it in 1827). Einstein suggested that the specks were being jostled by molecules in the liquid, an idea that finally convinced many early 20th century skeptics of the atomic nature...