Word: warping
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Marvels have been created out of a sense of inferiority, as the history of American museums proves. But from the 1880s to the late 1950s, American museums--the Whitney itself being the lone exception--were less interested in fostering American artists than in acquiring, at warp speed, the cultural treasures of Europe. This applied to modernism as well as to the Renaissance, and it wouldn't change until the late '50s, when Abstract Expressionism began to be elevated into the Triumph of American Painting. Earlier 20th century American art took much longer to be appreciated by Americans (or anyone else...
What can you do? This is a film where Arquette's character does "secret" surveillance for murder planning while wearing a highly reflective, marathon-runner-type foil-warp dress...
That's an immense if. Drexler's idea was initially dismissed as science fiction, but even skeptics admit that, unlike time travel and warp drives, nothing about it actually violates the laws of physics. And when in 1989 an IBM team famously spelled the Big Blue logo in xenon atoms, nanotech spread from the basements of feverish acolytes poring over Drexler's seminal book, Engines of Creation (1986), to the research labs of NASA and Xerox PARC. Today nanotech researchers speak not of if but of when. Great leaps forward come from thinking outside the box. Drexler may be remembered...
...course it couldn't last. In late 1996 the warp-speed growth in many of these nations began to slow--an inevitable turn in the business cycle. But the stutter was enough to panic a few investors, who headed for the exits. That set off a rapid spiral of defaults that became known as the Asian Contagion. Thailand's problems quickly became Indonesia's, then Korea's, in a dangerous daisy chain that is still looping together--witness last month's shuddering devaluation of the Brazilian real...
...physics and astronomy had led him to the work of Miguel Alcubierre, who suggested in a 1994 paper that the space-time continuum could be modified within the framework of Einstein's theory of general relativity to allow a spaceship to travel faster than light--much like the "warp drives" of science fiction. Serious physicists don't dismiss such theories out of hand, describing them as intriguing thought experiments that could conceivably be proved true in, oh, say, 300 or 400 years...