Word: realms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...take issue with your Science heading for the story on the new cruise missiles [July 30]. What is going on there is not science but technology and engineering. Science deals with the acquiring of new knowledge. The use, including misuse or ill use, of that knowledge is the realm of politicians, engineers and technologists. Uncritical association of the word science does not help the public to recognize the profound issue involved here...
...stock in the Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. (which lends money to the South African government), the committee's statement put the case with remarkable candor: "We recognize that divestiture is of little practical consequence and hence is almost entirely symbolic. Still, symbols and gestures are important in the realm of moral and humane concerns...
Thus the problems that the individual copes with as a private person are knotty enough; public issues have grown immeasurably more complex. Government has long since subsumed science and technology into its realm, both as the fountainhead of its projects and as an object of its regulation. The calculations that measure national military strength are as impenetrable to the civilian-on-the-street as the formulas of the ancient alchemists. The surreal arithmetic of SALT might as well be the music of the spheres, for all the help it gives ordinary folks trying to get a clear picture...
Even opponents concede that Thom's mathematics is impeccable; the trouble begins only when he applies the theory to phenomena outside the realm of pure mathematics. It turns out that most of the elementary structures are not quite so elementary: although the simplest of these, the "fold" catastrophe, may be depicted by a parabola, the complex "parabolic umbilic" model cannot be represented in fewer than six dimensions. In addition, some of the structures have such a narrow range of stable states that they are practically useless as real-life models...
Matthiessen reveals a lot in The Snow Leopard. Thoughts of his second wife, who died of cancer, linger on. She joined him late in the lifelong search that took him throughout the world and into the realm of hallucinogenic drugs. Together they tried everything, enjoying the experiences but never satisfying themselves. Not until Debra discovered Buddhism did they pause long enought to consider it, above their other choices, the answer. And though it did't solve all their problems--marital or emotional-- it brought some amount of order, and what Matthiessen believes is peace and understanding...