Word: galileo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These latest glitches are mere footnotes in the seemingly endless litany of NASA's woes: the Challenger disaster, the nearsighted Hubble Space Telescope, the crippled Galileo probe to Jupiter, the badly designed and perpetually redesigned space station Freedom. By now, the U.S. space agency has a firmly established reputation for mounting expensive, ambitious projects that don't quite work right. At a time when Congress is looking at every possible way to slash the budget deficit, NASA has become an obvious target...
...where dinners run $90 (excluding wine) and where 40% of the weekday customers are writing off their meals. "I wasn't hurt at all ((by the 1986 act))," says owner Jean-Louis Palladin. He suspects that the new plan could cream someone like Roberto Donna, the owner of nearby Galileo, where 80% of the lunchers are lawyers. Yet Donna isn't bellyaching either. "Maybe we'll lose 10% of the business, but we'll make it up at dinner," he sighs. "Democrats are excellent customers...
Popes rarely apologize. So it was big news in October when John Paul II made a speech vindicating Galileo Galilei. In 1633 the Vatican put the astronomer under house arrest for writing, against church orders, that the earth revolves around the sun. The point of the papal statement was not to concede the obvious fact that Galileo was right about the solar system. Rather, the Pope wanted to restore and honor Galileo's standing as a good Christian. In the 17th century, said the Pope, theologians failed to distinguish between belief in the Bible and interpretation of it. Galileo contended...
Scientists, meanwhile, were demystifying the universe. Strangely, no one knows for sure who invented the telescope, but by 1609 Galileo Galilei had built one of his own. With it he was able to confirm the heretical speculations of Copernicus, Kepler and Tycho Brahe that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our universe. The specific origins of the microscope are equally obscure. In the 17th century, Robert Hooke used it to describe accurately the anatomy of a flea and the design of a feather; Antonie de Leeuwenhoek discovered a world of wriggling organisms in a drop of water...
...Galileo, Rene Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton and other scientists had clarified the principles by which machines work, an essential step in building ever better machines. Henceforth Western civilization's technological supremacy was beyond challenge. Mechanical invention led inexorably to another step in the West's commercial and political hegemony over the world: the Industrial Revolution...