Word: mccrea
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Ride the High Country. Grey is the color of the hero's hair. He helped bring law and order to the West, but civilization has made the former marshal (Joel McCrea) obsolete. Then he gets the offer of man's work: bankers in the town of Hornitos want him to pick up and transport gold along lonely trails from a new strike in the High Sierras at a place candidly christened Coarse Gold. He runs across another ex-lawman (Randolph Scott), who is picking up pennies as a carnival sharpshooter. Scott agrees to go along, and suggests...
...privileges. When the terrified bride decamps on her wedding night and rejoins the gold-guarding trio, the serious shooting begins. The good-guy bad-guy struggle is dramatically tangled and intensified by the fact that Scott and Starr have intended all along to either sweet-talk or pistol-silence McCrea out of the gold...
...root of the problem, says McCrea. is that light does not travel at infinite speed, and other influences such as gravitation are presumably just as slow. So when distant parts of the universe interact by attracting or irradiating each other, they do so only after a long delay...
...classic paragraph, McCrea asks his readers to consider a remote part, P, of the universe. "We see no other part of the universe," he says, "in the state in which it influences P. For example, if P is one billion light-years away, and Q is a part of the universe one billion light-years away in the opposite direction, then, if the universe is static, whatever influence Q has on P when we observe P depends on the state of Q at a time two billion years before Q was in the state in which we observe...
...universe were of finite size, says McCrea, man might learn about it by continuing his observations for a long but finite time. But since the universe is al most certainly unbounded, even a very long period of observation, say ten billion years, would be insufficient. He thinks that cosmologists should include a factor of unavoidable uncertainty in their theories. "Thus we should be asserting almost nothing about what the universe is like at great distances in space or time. This provides a view of cosmology that essentially leaves room for endless observational surprises. It seems more satisfactory than the recent...