Word: cosmically
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Through Keck, the space telescope and other new devices, astronomers hope to get a closer look at a myriad of cosmic quandaries: quasars; pulsars, the spinning neutron stars that transmit precisely spaced radio pulses; and the dusty smudges around some stars, which could be the beginnings of planetary systems much like the sun's. And because light from space, traveling at 186,000 miles a second, takes time to reach the earth, the deeper into space astronomers can probe, the farther back into the past they can see. Says Schmidt: "By looking farther out in the universe, you are paging...
...third suggestion; the Overpowering Assumption, I think, is best. But not for the reasons he suggests--that the assumption is so cosmic that it might 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 it is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we, all like to be called assistants" net "graders"--you may be able to ferret...
There is a third method of dealing with examination questions that is by the use of the overpowering assumption, an assumption so cosmic that it is sometimes accepted. For example, we wrote that it was pretty obvious that the vague generality was the key device in any discussion of examination writing. Why is it obvious? As a matter of fact it isn't obvious at all, but just an arbitrary point from which to start. That is an example of an unwarranted assumption...
Richard P. Feynman, 66, is a Nobel-prizewinning physicist who talks like a New York City cabby, plays the bongo drums and, to judge from his uninhibited autobiography, thinks as much of his ability to crack safes as he does of his genius for breaking cosmic codes. As part of the brain trust that made the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, Feynman amused himself during quiet desert nights by entering colleagues' offices and picking the locks meant to guard nature's most destructive secrets. Since 1951 he has opened thousands of young minds as a professor at the California Institute...
Swinging within about 55 million miles of the sun every 76 years, Halley's comet has been an object of awe since what may have been the first reported sighting, by Chinese astronomers in 240 B.C. But when this cosmic snowball of ice and dust-with a nucleus between 3 and 6 miles across and a tail millions of miles long-streaks across the sky in 1986, it will be greeted for the first time by five spacecraft. In the vanguard of an international effort to study the comet, the Soviet Union recently launched two 4.5-ton unmanned space...