Word: explaining
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...write you in order to explain why we are not pledging to make any contributions to the Harvard-Radcliffe Fund, lest you attribute this fact to ingratitude or niggardliness...
...Council argues the policy will not hurt any student who is genuinely ill, because a senior tutor could explain the reason for a medical excuse in a letter appended to a student's transcript. But often the reasons behind a sick-out--though legitimate--are not as simply explained as a broken leg or German Measles. Undergraduates who ask for excuses because of personal problems or serious mental distress might not want to advertise these private matters in a letter that will go into their permanent University record...
What Thomas does is extraordinarily rare. It is hard enough to explain specialized scientific findings to scientists in other fields, and harder still to get it right and still hold the attention of untutored novices. Add touches of poetry, joyful optimism and an awe-inspired mysticism, and the job becomes impossible. Except that the impossible, like so many of the natural phenomena that Thomas describes, happens...
...allows the theory such wide-ranging applications is its emphasis on qualitative rather than quantitative analysis. What matters is not when or not to what extent something will happen, but whether it will take place at all. Thus catastrophe theorists can claim to understand phenomena other mathematical approaches cannot explain: naturally-occuring discontinuities or "jumps." Since the time of Newton and Leibniz, founders of the calculus three centuries ago, mathematical models in science have been concerned with the regular rotation of planets, the gradual increase in pressure of a gas being heated and the continuously-changing velocity of a falling...
WHILE THE authors try to deflect these criticisms, their own position, especially in light of some questionable applications, is not entirely convincing. Thom writes that "our use of local models...implies nothing about the 'ultimate nature of reality'." His catastrophe theory purported not to "explain" phenomena but merely to describe them--a crucial distinction the authors, as well as other proponents, refuse to make. If the mark of a science is both to explain and to predict phenomena, and catastrophe theory often does neither, a re-evaluation of its worth may be in order...