Word: forme
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Throughout the century now ending, the trade balance of tenses has been a simple one: America has exported tomorrow around the world--not just in the form of the latest machines, youthful trends and state-of-the-art Star Wars visions, but also in the sense of the born-again optimism native to a young Republic of Hope. The more traditional cultures of the world, in turn, have brought into America pieces of the past--Ayurvedic medicine, say, or Tai Chi, and, more deeply, a sense of community and continuity that has breathed new life into the "old-fashioned" American...
...ROBERT BRESSON was its finest and most influential purveyor. In 13 features from Les Anges du Peche (1943) to L'Argent (1983), the Frenchman who called himself a "jolly pessimist" went his own thorny way and, through his severe, seductive example, established the dominant style of a minority art form. His films, with little dialogue and music, are in effect silent pictures; they are certainly moving pictures, for they tell stories of people drawn toward death or transfiguration. Bresson was preoccupied with the mysterious workings of God's will, with saints ground down by sinners; Diary of a Country Priest...
General relativity completely changed the discussion of the origin and fate of the universe. A static universe could have existed forever or could have been created in its present form at some time in the past. On the other hand, if galaxies are moving apart today, they must have been closer together in the past. About 15 billion years ago, they would all have been on top of one another and their density would have been infinite. According to the general theory, this Big Bang was the beginning of the universe and of time itself. So maybe Einstein deserves...
Nature rarely bestows gifts on scientists, however, without exacting a price, and the price, in this case, takes the form of additional complications. Among other things, string theory requires the existence of up to seven dimensions in addition to the by now familiar four (height, width, length and time). It also requires the existence of an entirely new class of subatomic particles, known as supersymmetric particles, or "sparticles." Moreover, there isn't just one string theory but five. Although scientists could rule out none of them, it seemed impossible that all of them could be right...
...readily mistranslated as a justification for relativism says more about the way the world was already tending than about Einstein. His stature gave an underpinning to ideas that had nothing to do with his science or personal inclinations. The entire thrust of modern art, whether it took the form of Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism or fantasy, was a conscious effort to rejigger the shapes of observable reality in the same spirit of liberation and experimentation that Einstein brought to science...