Word: jakobs
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...love of old ships and the gritty charm of old buildings and streets, they began a unique route to urban renewal. The first step, in 1967, was the establishment of the South Street Seaport Museum, led by Advertising Executive Peter Stanford, and supported by Shipping Magnate Jakob Isbrandtsen. The pooling of resources from the private sector helped make the institution more than a collection of artifacts. Among the principal contributors: Laurance Rockefeller, the Astor Foundation, RCA, Exxon and Time Inc. The museum, now headed by Christopher Lowery, began to acquire ancient real estate along with old vessels and naval paraphernalia...
...theory of the world ether--an invisible, all-permeating medium for the propagation of radiation--Jakob sees his calling and the chance for a crowning accomplishment of classical physics. But he fails to realize this dream...
...modest way, Jakob finds the centralized, autocratic German state harsh and arbitrary as well. It scorns the old, leaving them to languish and wither in unheated anonymity, and sends the young to the trenches. As Hegel claims, not without graceful ride, states disembowel individuals on "the slaughter bench of history...
...Hegel justified the carnage in the name of freedom. Witnessing the bloodshed of World War I. Jakob is less sanguine. Arbitrariness in physics, the standard of order, reflects the emergent nationalism of bureaucrats and the social chaos such faceless patriotism creates. As classical physics becomes classical, the state wages war with it. The pure motives of truth for truth's sake are corrupted in the rush to find new and destructive uses for physics. Machine guns, poison gas, and airplanes now down a generation of young men, some of them physicists. Their elders, frustrated generals like the institute's director...
...institute directors, people talk knowledgeably about "windows of vulnerability." "throw-weight," and of putting missiles on trains, an idea as absurd as mounting them in baby carriages. But as we, like Europe before 1914, lunch we know not where, absurdity becomes dangerous, and no longer only sad, as was Jakob's bitter luxury. Next time, no one will read of an old man's cold pleasures, of musing over weak tea about shattered, harmonies and faded memories, in ruins wrought by creatures who, in their foolish scribblings, advised their children to crouch under school desks so as to hide from...