Word: phenomena
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...trio of scholars formed the first serious investigatory body, the British Society for Psychical Research. Its purpose: to subject psychic phenomena to something like scientific testing, conducted with an open mind but a skeptical spirit. Three years later, an American society was formed along even more stringent lines, with membership consisting of scientists, not scholars. The best known among them was philosopher and psychologist William James, brother of the novelist Henry and one of the enduring figures of American intellectual history...
...suffering through the story of his daughter's rape constitute a significant part of his book, resembling in some ways evangelical testimony more than previous scientific arguments for belief. But he also explains why, although he does not believe God is rationally provable, he thinks that natural phenomena - such as the development of conditions favoring life on earth in the face of incredible odds - point toward the divine...
...evolution is just a theory, noting that in his scientific world the word theory "is not intended to convey uncertainty; for that purpose a scientist would use the word hypothesis." The book is hard on intelligent design, heaping scientific doubt on its key notion of "irreducible complexity" in phenomena like blood clotting, and theological scorn on its ultimate implications ("I.D. portrays the Almighty as a clumsy Creator, having to intervene at regular intervals to fix the inadequacies of His own initial plan ... this is a very unsatisfactory image"). (See TIME's religion covers...
...quantum field theory are actually the data you need to move from one scale to another.This development allowed researchers to calculate physical properties at one scale from those of a smaller scale. RG theory implies that, with enough computer power, it would be possible to describe such large-scale phenomena as the boiling of water in terms of the interactions between fundamental subatomic particles.“Wilson is famous for understanding how, in transitions from one phase of matter to another, there are quantities that are completely independent of the details of the states of matter...
...Instead one should just listen to the sound of the words, she says, quoting the Mexican writer Octavio Paz: “Listen to me as one listens to the rain.”Her more recent work has become increasingly spiritual with frequent references to dreams and phenomena beyond our world.Valentine says that contemporary culture is less receptive to poetry than in the fifties when she started writing. “The interesting serious literature in this culture is declining fast, and that includes poetry because poetry is one of the first to go,” she says...