Word: cosmically
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...most American readers. His novels, short stories, plays, reviews and scientific treatises have been translated into nearly thirty languages, but only in the last five years have many of his works become available in English. The Chain of Chance, Lem's most recent novel, continues the strain of cosmic pessimism that pervades his thirty previous books while adding a new philosophical dimension guaranteed to challenge every reader's basic perception of reality...
Radiation, whether natural or manmade, is ubiquitous. Over a year's time, the average American is exposed to 100 to 200 millirems. This is roughly equivalent to the exposure from 10 to 20 chest X rays. About half of that radiation comes from the sun and cosmic rays, another 45% from exposure to diagnostic and therapeutic medical equipment, and only about 5% from atomic fallout and such consumer products as microwave ovens and TV sets and production of nuclear power. Radiation sickness is almost certain at exposures of around 50,000 millirems. The Government has set a permissible annual...
...they may be the most distant objects in the universe. Pulsars, or neutron stars, have also been detected; these highly compressed cadavers of massive stars usually signal their existence by their highly regular radio beeps. Even stranger are the giant stars that may have in effect gone down the cosmic drain: those elusive black holes, with gravitational fields so powerful that not even light can escape them. Astronomers have also picked up what may be the echo of the Creation. Coming from everywhere in the skies, and in a sense from nowhere at all, these faint microwaves appear...
...little inkling of this astronomical revolution. Yet to understand phenomena of such cosmic proportions, scientists must rely on his theoretical masterwork: the general relativity theory. Unfolded in 1916 to an astonished and largely uncomprehending scientific community, it is Einstein's complex and subtle yet beautifully elegant mathematical explanation of nature's most pervasive?and paradoxically, its weakest?force: gravity...
...even unbearable, to contemplate, like an infinite snow field of time, but the conception at least carried with it the serenity of the eternal. In recent decades, however, the Steady State model of the universe has yielded in the scientific mind to an even more difficult idea, full of cosmic violence. Most astronomers now accept the theory that the universe had an instant of creation, that it came to be in a vast fireball explosion 15 or 20 billion years ago. The shrapnel created by that explosion is still flying outward from the focus of the blast...