Word: saws
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Goddard meant his moon musings to be innocent enough, but when the Times saw them, it pounced. As anyone knew, the paper explained with an editorial eye roll, space travel was impossible, since without atmosphere to push against, a rocket could not move so much as an inch. Professor Goddard, it was clear, lacked "the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools...
Though Goddard never saw a bit of it, credit would be given him, and--more important to a man who so disdained the press--amends would be made. After Apollo 11 lifted off en route to humanity's first moon landing, the New York Times took a bemused backward glance at a tart little editorial it had published 49 years before. "Further investigation and experimentation," said the paper in 1969, "have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well...
...young engineering student in England, Wittgenstein saw the hope of the new mathematical logic, and rushed to Cambridge to become the protege of Bertrand Russell, whose monumental Principia Mathematica (1913), written with Alfred North Whitehead, was an attempt to reduce all mathematics to logic. Wittgenstein's first book, published in England in 1922, the even more grandly titled Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, went even further, and was thought by him, and by some of his admirers, to have brought philosophy to an end, its key problems definitively solved once and for all. Some "philosophical" propositions could be readily expressed and evaluated...
...problem is a practical one: if you design a bridge using a system that contains a contradiction, "the bridge may fall down." For Wittgenstein, the problem was about the social context in which human beings can be said to "follow the rules" of a mathematical system. What Turing saw, and Wittgenstein did not, was the importance of the fact that a computer doesn't need to understand rules to follow them. Who "won"? Turing comes off as somewhat flatfooted and naive, but he left us the computer, while Wittgenstein left us...Wittgenstein...
...saw them waving their arms...