Word: flowing
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...digest the 29 stories in one sitting but an even more intent reader to manage to surmise the complex connections between the vignettes, which are often too based on moniker relations rather than convergence of plot or metaphor. Often one finds the need for a family tree, a flow chart to keep straight the characters...
...proclaimed by the U.S. Congress and the President as the Decade of the Brain. Every facet of mind, from mental images to moral sense, from mundane memories to acts of genius, has been tied to tracts of neural real estate. Using fMRI, a new scanning technique that measures blood flow, scientists can tell whether the owner of the brain is imagining a face or a place. They can knock out a gene and prevent a mouse from learning, or insert extra copies and make it learn better. They can see the shrunken wrinkles that let a murderer kill without conscience...
...gets even more bizarre. According to Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott, the flow of time loses its meaning when you hop from one universe to another. In the timeless metaverse, in fact, a baby cosmos could beget a baby that would beget a baby that might ultimately give birth to the universe that started it all. "It's quite possible," says Gott, "that the universe could end up being its own great-grandmother...
...travel through the three dimensions of space pretty much at will--moving forward or back, left or right, up or down--without even thinking about it. When it comes to the fourth dimension, though, we appear to be stuck. Time flows on in one direction only, and we flow with it like corks bobbing helplessly in a river. So the idea of traveling through time, as opposed to with time, is immensely seductive. Who wouldn't want to know what technology will look like in the year 3000, or witness the assassination of Julius Caesar...
...perpetual motion had the excuse of ignorance. In 1618, for example, a London doctor named Robert Fludd invented a waterwheel that needed no river to drive it. Water poured into his system would, in theory, turn a wheel that would power a pump that would cause the water to flow back over the wheel that would power the pump, and so on. But the second law means that any friction created by wheel and pump would turn into heat and noise; reconverting that into mechanical energy would take an external power source. Even if the machine were friction-free...