Word: late
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...positivists, Freud drew a sharp distinction between religious faith (which is not checkable or correctable) and scientific inquiry (which is both). For himself, this meant the denial of truth-value to any religion whatever, including Judaism. As for politics, he left little doubt and said so plainly in his late--and still best known--essay, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), noting that the human animal, with its insatiable needs, must always remain an enemy to organized society, which exists largely to tamp down sexual and aggressive desires. At best, civilized living is a compromise between wishes and repression...
Millions of moviegoers winced and smiled. The scene neatly captured their own late-'60s ambivalence toward the ever more synthetic landscape of their times. They loved their cheap, easy-to-clean Formica countertops, but envied--and longed for--the authentic touch and timelessness of marble and wood. The chord struck by that line in The Graduate underscored how much had happened in the six decades since the summer of 1907, when Leo Hendrik Baekeland made the laboratory breakthrough that would change the stuff our world is made...
...kill bacteria. The mission was inspired by the earlier work of Gerhard Domagk, who in 1935 showed that the injection of a simple compound, Prontosil, cured systemic streptococcal infections. This breakthrough demonstrated that invading bacteria could be killed with a drug and led to a fevered search in the late 1930s for similar compounds. Fleming's Penicillium notatum became the convenient starting point for Florey's team at Oxford...
...late 1930s, however, Goddard grew troubled. He had noticed long before that of all the countries that showed an interest in rocketry, Germany showed the most. Now and then, German engineers would contact Goddard with a technical question or two, and he would casually respond. But in 1939 the Germans suddenly fell silent. With a growing concern over what might be afoot in the Reich, Goddard paid a call on Army officials in Washington and brought along some films of his various Nells. He let the generals watch a few of the launches in silence, then turned to them...
Hubble finally got his hands on the Hale when it went into service in 1949. It was too late; he had suffered a major heart attack, and he never fully regained the stamina it took to spend all night in a freezing-cold observatory. No imaginable discovery, however, could have added to his reputation...