Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What happened in that cosmic bacchanal to Sandra Lee and her colleagues at the cosmetic company is the sum and substance of this novel by William Sansom, a versatile British writer of travel books (The Icicle and the Sun), novels (The Loving Eye) short stories and TV plays...
...Columbia University, has already proved to be remarkably sensitive. The spaces between its plates are filled with neon gas, and when alternate plates are charged with 10,000 volts of electricity, bright streams of sparks streak across the chamber at jagged angles. Those sparks trace the track of cosmic rays, high-energy particles striking down from outer space...
...neutrinos, says Dr. Chiu. Most of them will probably last unchanged as long as the universe. They will cruise endlessly, moving at the speed of light, their courses curved by the gravitation of nearby stars. In the depths of space they are a hundred thousand times as common as cosmic rays. On the earth, where the nearby sun generates many neutrinos, some 100 billion of them pass through a square centimeter every second. Dr. Chiu estimates that about half of the neutrinos generated by stars could pass through ten billion earths without being absorbed...
...third suggestion, the Overpowering Assumption, I think is the best: but not for the reasons he suggests--that the assumption is so cosmic it may sometimes be accepted. It is rarely "accepted;" we aren't here to accept or reject, we're here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal, unorthodox, paradoxic your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations), the more interesting an essay is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret...
There is a third method of dealing with examination questions--that is by use of the overpowering assumption, an asumption so cosmic that it is sometimes accepted. For example, we wrote that it is pretty obvious that the vague generality is the key device in a discussion of examination writing. Why is it obvious? As a matter of fact, it isn't obvious at all, but just as an arbitrary point from which to start. That is an example of an unwarranted ranted assumption...