Word: forlying
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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In a sense, all the change that shaped the world until the onset of modernity had its origins in Newton's mind. For what he showed was this: the universe is knowable and governed by universal laws--therefore predictable, therefore perfectible by human reason and will. Go beyond science to...
In a sense, of course, Newton's was the greatest magic of all: the thought (owing something to alchemy) that for all phenomena of nature and society, there must be not only a discoverable secret but a generalization with the force of law--a solution to every problem, scientific, social...
We live in the consequences of that immense ambition; we have seen its results, both splendid and ghastly (space exploration, Marxist utopias). If religion taught faith and the mystery of the Causeless Cause (the ultimate secret, God), Newtonism located human intelligence in a cosmos of magnificently impassive reciprocities, celestial mechanics...
Of all the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson has fared the worst at the hands of revisionists. If he has managed to keep his place on Mount Rushmore, he has been vilified almost everywhere else in recent years as a slave-owning hypocrite and racist; a political extremist; an apologist for...
The brilliant American icon gets overtaken from time to time by his own apparent incoherence, his strangeness. He kept minutely detailed account books, for example--he was an obsessive record keeper who made daily notes on everything from barometric readings to the progress of 29 varieties of vegetables at Monticello...