Word: newtonian
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When conflicting facts were discovered by increasingly sensitive instruments, physicists tended to ignore them, or to explain them away by highly artificial creations. Most famous of these was the ether-a tenuous material supposed to fill all space. Ether was necessary (in Newtonian physics) for carrying light waves...
...stood for weddings-or funerals. His roosters crowed for joy-or looked monstrously fierce. But the most confusing thing about Chagall was that all of his few symbols hung somewhere between Heaven and Earth. Cows jumped over housetops, and fiddlers played in the sky. Like Einstein, Chagall went beyond Newtonian law. As in some Hasidic dances, his whirling, painted figures achieved an ecstasy of mystic levitation-but they never came down...
Died. W. Denham Verschoyle, 75, anti-Newtonian inventor who spent most of his life trying to make an apple fall up; near London...
...give them a background which can be used in teaching, politics, business, or any other occupation. Surely there is nothing more practical than this. The usual, supposition is that theory is entirely impractical, and herein lies the flaw in the anti-theory argument. The guts of physics are the Newtonian principles, and yet nothing can beat physics for practically. Cook books could never have been written without the principles of theoretical chemistry. Two plus two equals four: this is most practical, and yet highly theoretical. The practicality of sociology is that it reaches the essential properties of society...
Transits of Mercury are a means of charting its queerly complicated orbit. The long axis of its elliptical orbit does not stay fixed, but slowly rotates, and the planet's point of nearest approach to the sun shifts each year. Calculations of classical Newtonian gravitation predict some shift, but not nearly so much as that actually observed. In desperation a French astronomer named Leverrier decided that the rest of the shift must be due to an unseen planet even closer to the sun than Mercury. Leverrier called it "Vulcan." He looked long and hard for it. Once a doctor...