Word: phenomena
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...come from many more sources than the space program. Though the Stanley Kubrick-Arthur C. Clarke spectacle 2001 was packing in aficionados at movie theaters months before Apollo 8, the film gained a prophetic impact after man reached the moon. Even among the scientific community, such astonishing celestial phenomena as supernovae and "black holes" have become a subject for metaphysical conjecture. Harvard Astronomer Charles A. Whitney, writing in his 1971 book The Discovery of Our Galaxy, suggests that black holes might be "the passageways to another universe," a possibility that throws him back on the language of religion. "When...
...representation. That Sir Thomas Browne is now studied in universities as a specimen of English 17th century prose doesn't concern the reader, who turns to Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the same spirit that he turns to Wittgenstein or Levi-Strauss: to collect what could be called "taxonomies of natural phenomena." Nostalgia, the sad evocation of our universal angst, episodes which recall a decisive moment in our lives, ontological dread before the landscape we inhabit: these are all sensations which, like the reader's bookshelves, belong to some taxonomic order...
...didn't live long enough to write or publish all that he could have, these volumes reside on the shelves like orphans; and I act as their self-appointed guardian. What justifies such a posture? The conviction that Rosenfeld's novel, Passage From Home, identifies taxonomies of natural phenomena which coincide with mine: Chicago, the lives of the Jewish urban intelligentsia, family sorrow; that in the journalistic, feuilleton-like reflections of literature collected in The Age of Enormity, a musuem of modern life has been opened where the meditations of a typical educated reader in our time await inspection...
...closed-circuit TV, the researchers watched 50 scientists of the Interior Department's Tektite program as they made underwater observations of deep-sea phenomena off the coast of the Virgin Islands. The scientist-crews went down in a submersible habitat in groups of five and remained submerged fathoms deep for two or three weeks at a time...
...director of The Emigrants, to learn that he has made the most political film of the year. On the surface the movie is an epic celebration of 19th century Swedish immigration to the promised country. But within its rich textures is an oddly lucid explanation of some current American phenomena-among them the ethnic clashes in Newark and Canarsie-and for the landslide re-election of Richard Nixon...