Word: new
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last few days of the second millennium tick rapidly away (though diehard purists still insist it doesn't really end for another year), we seem more fascinated with the subject than ever. At the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, crowds are flocking to a new exhibition, "The Story of Time," which examines time from cultural, religious, artistic and scientific viewpoints. On this side of the Atlantic, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has opened a permanent show on America's fascination with time. In bookstores, best-selling author James Gleick's Faster (Pantheon), which laments the accelerating pace...
...Measured at short enough durations, space-time loses its apparently smooth, continuous structure, devolving into what Princeton physicist John Wheeler calls "quantum foam." The orderly flow of events may really be as much an illusion as the flickering frames of a movie. And according to independent physicist Barbour's new book, even the apparent sequence of the flickers is illusory...
Then came trains and factories, and with them the need to coordinate the schedules of hundreds and even thousands of people. It was the railroad companies that invented time zones, in 1883. Because of the earth's rotation, the sun was highest at different times in New York City and, say, Washington, which lay a bit farther west. The 11-min. difference in local noon could lead to disaster at intersections...
...coincidence that inexpensive alarm clocks and wristwatches began appearing at the end of the 1800s. "In the 19th century," says historian Michael O'Malley, author of Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, "we were urged to merge our sense of time with mechanical devices. It allowed for new forms of social organization...
Thomas Thompson, a New Mexico forensic psychologist, insists that ASPs are "hardwired to act out," and that "they lack free will." His evaluations recently helped convert the sentences of two death-row inmates to life in prison. Yet Thompson's brand of biological determinism sets off alarms for many. "The idea that you're simply born bad is an evil misconception," says Peter Fonagy, director of the Child and Family Center at the Menninger Clinic, who has done a review of conduct-disorder studies for the British government. "We have to look at intervening early and how that can help...