Word: spiralling
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Astronomers have observed that galaxies seem to come in four shapes: 1) spherical, 2) elliptical (like an egg), 3) tightly spiral (like a watch spring) and 4) loosely spiral (like a pinwheel). The Milky Way is a pinwheel. Sir James reasoned that a spherical galaxy spinning in space, like a whirling ball of soft butter, must spread out at the edges and flatten in the center and become more & more disk-shaped, thus evolving from a ball to a spiral. Therefore, said he, a sphere must be the first stage in galactic evolution and a spiral the last...
Before he left for his home in the country-at Luoviers, where he is Mayor -M. Mendès-France unburdened himself of an earnest warning. The nation, he said, stood on the brink of a dangerous inflationary spiral. "Economic powers," particularly the Bank of France, had "brought to bear a strong, indiscreet but apparently most effective pressure" against his proposal for stern preventive measures. M. Mendès-France was sorrowful, not angry. He went off with the air of a doctor who expects to be called back...
...glass tube, then dropped into the beam microscopic particles of matter (e.g., chromium). When the particles were smaller than the light's wave length, they fell straight down. But bigger particles, instead of falling straight, as they would have if affected only by gravity, fell in a corkscrew spiral, with regularly spaced turns...
State Trooper G. F. Randall, alone inside a concrete building beside the steel radio tower of the West Virginia State Police got up to close a window against the wind, and saw the spiral-shaped cone sweeping over the hill toward him. "As it got closer I could see it was filled with wood, trees and outhouses. It seemed to be coming directly toward me. I was so damned interested I never moved...
History's most balanced lives, Author Mumford believes, were led by the Greeks. The great Greeks were men of action as well as thinkers. But ironically, says Author Mumford, their very sense of wholeness was the Greeks' undoing. Athenians began to see life not as a "spiral of change and development," but as a "superbly closed circle"-"life arrested meant art perfected." When mortal danger threatened them, in the form of Alexander the Great, the Greeks could not summon themselves to the excess of battle...