Word: cosmically
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Fourteen thousand astronomical targets. Groundbreaking observations of Shoemaker-Levy 9’s 1994 collision with Jupiter. Pictures of the closest supernova in four centuries. Star luminosity measurements suggesting that cosmic expansion is accelerating. Deep field images showing uncountable galaxies in every direction. Stellar photos that found their way into everything from coffee table books to children’s television shows. The Hubble Space Telescope is responsible for all of these and much, much more...
...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 is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course—and we all like...
There is a third method of dealing with examination questions—that is by the use of 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 wasn’t obvious at all, but just an arbitrary point from which to start. This is an example of an unwarranted assumption...
...rebalance some cosmic scale, another wave is washing over South Asia like none the world has ever seen. The worst disaster in memory has evoked the greatest outpouring of charity. "Just as we see the power of nature to destroy, we have seen the power of human compassion to build," said Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. The pledges coming in to the U.N. for tsunami relief already surpass all the relief money received in 2004 for the top 20 disasters combined. The politics of pity is never pure, so there was a kind of global competition...
...High-Powered Design "Cosmic Conundrum" [Dec. 6] explored the "anthropic principle," the proposition that the universe is "uncannily well suited to the existence of life." Just as physicists are ultimately baffled by the laws of the universe, physicians and surgeons spend their entire lives trying to comprehend the complexities of the body's systems. The more we understand human physiology, the more we believe that a higher power must be responsible for the body's creation as well as the varying outcomes (good and bad) we see after treatment of seemingly similar diseases. The longer I practice medicine, the more...