Word: thought
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...culture. As to the first, he created the largely silent listener who encourages the analysand to say whatever comes to mind, no matter how foolish, repetitive or outrageous, and who intervenes occasionally to interpret what the patient on the couch is struggling to say. While some adventurous early psychoanalysts thought they could quantify just what proportion of their analysands went away cured, improved or untouched by analytic therapy, such confident enumerations have more recently shown themselves untenable. The efficacy of analysis remains a matter of controversy, though the possibility of mixing psychoanalysis and drug therapy is gaining support...
...make sure that wherever they are, they have the chance to run their own course, to persevere and follow their own inspiration. We have to understand that engineering breakthroughs are not just mechanical or scientific--they are liberating forces that can continually improve people's lives. Who would have thought, as the 20th century opened, that one of its greatest contributions would come from two obscure, fresh-faced young Americans who pursued the utmost bounds of human thought and gave us all, for the first time, the power literally to sail beyond the sunset...
Goddard was thrilled with his triumph but resolved to say little about it. If people thought him daft when he was merely designing rockets, who knew what they'd say when the things actually started to fly? When word nonetheless leaked out about the launch and inquiries poured into Clark, Goddard answered each with a pinched, "Work is in progress; there is nothing to report." When he finished each new round of research, he'd file it under a deliberately misleading title--"Formulae for Silvering Mirrors," for example--lest it fall into the wrong hands...
...scientific rival, Harlow Shapley, who had already made his reputation by measuring the size of the Milky Way. Using bright stars called Cepheid variables as standardized light sources, he had gauged the galaxy as being an astounding 300,000 light-years across--10 times as big as anyone had thought. Yet Shapley claimed that the Milky Way was the whole cosmic ball of wax. The luminous nebulae were, he insisted, just what they looked like: clouds of glowing gas that were relatively nearby...
...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 within his system, and those that couldn't--among them, metaphysical riddles that had bedeviled philosophers...