Word: magical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...beyond science to politics and society: if all bodies, great and small, are subject to the same universal laws, the idea leads on to democracy (equality of all humans great and small) and the principle of universal justice. Newton's laws ousted older preferments of feudal hierarchy and magic (though Newton himself devoted frustrated years to the study of alchemy) and installed the authority of the inquiring human mind...
...sense, of course, Newton's was the greatest magic of all: the thought (owing something to alchemy) that for all phenomena of nature and society, there must be not only a discoverable secret but a generalization with the force of law--a solution to every problem, scientific, social or moral...
...ideas for their own sake. But he was also the most prodigious inventor of his era, indeed of all time, and he was recognized as the spirit of a new age by his contemporaries. They observed the amazing new products streaming out of his New Jersey laboratory and, sensing magic, named Edison the Wizard of Menlo Park...
There was a sort of magic about Edison, although it had nothing to do with illusions or misdirections. An assistant once described the Wizard at work, "displaying cunning in the way he neutralizes or intensifies electromagnets, applying strong or weak currents, and commands either negative or positive directional currents to do his bidding." But behind his arcane dexterity lay Edison's exhaustive research and his tenacious unwillingness to quit tinkering until a technical challenge had been met. "Genius," he famously remarked, "is about 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration." Or again, as he said in his autobiography, "There is no substitute...
Cartier-Bresson demonstrated the strange magic in moments in which nothing much happens but all sorts of things are revealed. RUNNERS-UP Identifying the Dead, Russian Front by Dmitri Baltermants; Wall Street by Paul Strand