Word: knot
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...more vivid or explicit, or better attuned to the fresco-like scale of the canvas. And yet how provisional these dancers seem, compared with their ancestors; how deliberately imperfect, within the brusque signs for arched back, swollen belly, prancing, dragging, reaching. One clue to this is the complicated knot formed by the crossing legs of the second figure from the left, and the hands of the two dancers in front of her. There the circle of the dance breaks; the hands have come apart, they do not touch. Classical art would not show this. Choreographic "imperfection" matches the brusque details...
ASTRONOMERS HAVE LONG SUSPECTED THAT THE Whirlpool galaxy, 20 million light- years away, harbors in its core a black hole, a superdense knot of matter whose gravity is so powerful that even light can't escape. Now a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has convinced them. The picture, released last week, reveals a giant X at the galaxy's center. The scientists think one arm of the X is a massive, doughnut-shaped cloud of dust swirling around the hole. The doughnut is seen edge on, hiding the black hole from view, but two cone-shaped beams...
...spectacular technical tours de force in the history of stone carving. What is so extraordinary about it is the extremes to which Canova pushed the basic fact that a carved figure group is an arrangement of stone and air. Here, the empty spaces, the holes in the white love knot of figures, are as interesting as the limbs, bodies and heads. Walk round it and you see a kind of interstitial fugue of tunnels, gaps and fissures. No photograph can give more than the faintest idea of how this sculpture unfolds, closes and changes under the moving...
...existence of the giant clouds was virtually required for the Big Bang, first postulated in the 1920s, to maintain its reign as the dominant explanation of the cosmos. According to the theory, the universe burst into being as a submicroscopic, unimaginably dense knot of pure energy that flew outward in all directions, spewing radiation as it went, congealing into particles and then into atoms of gas. Over billions of years, the gas was compressed by gravity into galaxies, stars, planets and, eventually, even humans...
There are several sports in which the price of a ticket buys a knot in the stomach: car racing, bull-fighting, high-diving. No one wants it to happen, but everyone knows it might. And that is why we watch. You admire the skill and the grace, but you can't avoid the fact that you are paying to watch people risk their lives. He makes a living facing danger for your entertainment...