Word: coulds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...even thousands of people. It was the railroad companies that invented time zones, in 1883. Because of the earth's rotation, the sun was highest at different times in New York City and, say, Washington, which lay a bit farther west. The 11-min. difference in local noon could lead to disaster at intersections...
This elasticizing of space-time means, for example, that observers might disagree over which of two events happened first--and both could be right. Even more bizarrely, physicists including Stephen Hawking have seriously discussed the possibility that relativity might make it feasible (though not with any technology we know of today) to send objects backward in time...
Does that mean you could go back, kill your own grandfather and keep yourself from being born--a seeming absurdity? Maybe not, say some physicists. In one interpretation of quantum physics, the world splits at each moment into an infinite number of universes that proceed in parallel; if you killed your grandfather, it might be in an alternate universe, so it would have no effect on the universe you inhabit...
...altar. Happiness may be a warm puppy, but as Schulz once said, "Happiness is not very funny." Schulz infused the strips with his lifelong feelings of depression and insecurity--he had his heart broken by a real-life red-haired girl--and they showed, Camus-like, how one could feel lonely even in a crowd. Many of his panels have two characters outside, at night, staring at a field of stars. "Let's go inside and watch television," Charlie Brown says in one. "I'm beginning to feel insignificant...
...wants and slapstick antics. Schulz's Dr. Spock-era kids brought cartoons into the age of psychiatric help, 5[cents] at a time. Reflective, neurotic and deadpan, they were to their predecessors what Bob Newhart was to Moe Howard. They were children of postwar prosperity, a time when Americans could afford to have anxieties instead of fears. They played Beethoven; they parked in front of the TV; they cradled security blankets. (They played baseball too, but they weren't exactly good at it.) Our Gang could have taken them without breaking a sweat...