Word: moments
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...incubator, and that London was then hit by a cold spell, giving the mold a chance to grow. Later, as the temperature rose, the Staphylococcus bacteria grew like a lawn, covering the entire plate--except for the area surrounding the moldy contaminant. Seeing that halo was Fleming's "Eureka" moment, an instant of great personal insight and deductive reasoning. He correctly deduced that the mold must have released a substance that inhibited the growth of the bacteria...
...Germans, he wrote acerbically, could not possibly pay what the victors were demanding. Calling Wilson a "blind, deaf Don Quixote" and Clemenceau a xenophobe with "one illusion--France, and one disillusion--mankind" (and only at the last moment scratching the purple prose he had reserved for Lloyd George: "this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity"), an outraged Keynes prophesied that the reparations would keep Germany impoverished and ultimately threaten all Europe...
...know from the moment you open the Tractatus that it is something special. Each left-hand page is in German, facing its English translation on the right, and the sentences are numbered, using a hierarchical system that tells you this is a formal proof. The book begins straightforwardly enough: "1. The world is everything that is the case." (In German, it makes a memorable rhyming couplet: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.) And it ends with an ending to end all endings: "7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent...
...Again and again in Philosophical Investigations, he catches his interlocutors in the act of being suckered by their overconfident intuitions about what their words mean--what their words must mean, they think--when they talk about what's going on in their own minds. As he says, "The decisive moment in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent." (Today's neuroscientists fall into these same traps with stunning regularity, now that they have begun trying to think seriously about consciousness. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein's work has not been appreciated by many...
...recall with great fondness my first visit to Nairobi in 1970 when Louis ceremoniously led me to the room housing the crown jewels of human evolution. Every fossil took on a mythical cast as he waxed eloquent about how it revealed some magic moment of our origins. Here he was, the grand master, sharing his passion, knowledge and intuition with a new disciple. He was often like that: generous, open, supportive, always trying to win new converts to his way of working, his way of interpreting the past. Born in Kenya of English missionaries, Louis was initiated by tribal elders...