Word: cosmos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although the U.S. Skylab space station has overshadowed recent Russian manned space ventures, the Soviet Union is pressing ahead as strongly as ever in unmanned exploration of the cosmos. Last week the Russians took advantage of the current favorable position of the earth and Mars-an alignment that occurs only once every two years-to launch two more unmanned spacecraft toward the Red Planet. Dubbed Mars 4 and 5, the ships should reach the vicinity of the earth's nearest planetary neighbor, now some 42 million miles away, in about six months...
...alone in its space troubles. Two weeks ago, the Russians orbited an unmanned spacecraft that they identified only as Cosmos 557. Last week U.S. intelligence sources reported that the mysterious Cosmos was in fact an unmanned Soyuz spacecraft that appears to have been launched as the intended docking target for a second manned Soyuz. The two ships, in effect, would have formed a mini-space station in earth orbit. But a failure apparently occurred aboard Cosmos, and the scheduled manned launch had to be scrubbed. Thus the Russians appear to have suffered a second major setback in space only weeks...
...honored dichotomy. In the theocentric world of the Middle Ages, man lived in a holistic universe, with heaven above and earth below embraced in one divine economy. But the aggressive humanism of the Renaissance and the mechanistic visions of the scientific revolution shattered that unified cosmos. For more than three centuries, Western civilization has lived instead in a split-level universe conceived by the French philosopher René Descartes. A religious man, but also a rationalist, Descartes contended that man could demonstrate truth only about a world he could measure. The world of spirit was beyond such measurement, a matter...
...pieces in The Vonnegut Statement. But good grief! A term paper on Vonnegut? Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the author of Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rose-water and Slaughterhouse-Five? Vonnegut, that enemy of pretension who writes about the cosmos and fate as if God were a tricky garage mechanic? Since the late '60s, following the republication of some of the early novels, students have indeed been assigned Vonnegut term papers...
...Holiday," for instance, describes how the romantic image of the writer as "super-human" is given viability by "inoculating" it with a bit of reality--the writer taking a vacation like other mortals. Or, in "The Brain of Einstein," Barthes sees the myth of a universal formula for the cosmos, signified by the formula E =MC 2, located by the popular mind in the real physical organ which is Einstein's brain...