Word: newtonism
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...Princeton University, give three one-hour lectures on "Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Galois Representations," an abstract topic even by the rarefied standards of higher math. By the end of the first hour, though, they knew something was up. Recalls Nigel Boston, a visiting mathematician at Cambridge's Isaac Newton Institute: "We realized where he could be heading. People were giving each other wide-eyed looks." By the end of the third hour, the room was packed with excited number theorists. Wiles finished up his talk and wrote a simple equation on the blackboard, a mathematical afterthought that logically followed...
...this win was Harvard's defense, which was tighter than Olivia Newton-John's leather pants in the final scene of "Grease...
...himself as a victim, who is therefore infinitely justified. Ethnic cleansing is merely injured virtue catching up. Nothing is more empowering, as they say, than being a victim. It is the Rolls-Royce of self-justifications, a plenary indulgence. W.H. Auden described it as if it were one of Newton's laws: "Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return...
These behaviors are certainly clever, but what do they mean? Was Newton really devious? Can a cat really crave privacy on the potty? In short, do household pets really have a mental and emotional life? Their owners think so, but until recently, animal-behavior experts would have gone ballistic on hearing such a question. The worst sin in their moral vocabulary was anthropomorphism, projecting human traits onto animals. A dog or a cat might behave as if it were angry, lonely, sad, happy or confused, but that was only in the eye of the beholder. What was going on, they...
...bottom line: anthropomorphism has been proclaimed O.K. Your cat may well be grinning at you. Your dog may really be in a depression. And pets may be smarter than some of us think. After all, it took no time at all for Newton to train me to chase him through a farmer's field, trying desperately to retrieve a Frisbee...