Word: wide
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...April 1978 the Supreme Court paved the way for further advances in corporate political power. The Court, in the case of First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, declared unconstitutional a Massachusetts state law prohibiting corporations from spending money to influence state-wide initiataive campaigns when the issue at stake does not materially affect them. (Note that even this powerful law could not and did not prevent soft drink manufacturers from spending money to defeat the bottle bill initiative.) Justice Powell, in writing the majority opinion, stated: "[Free speech] is indispensable to decisionmaking in a democracy, and this...
Perhaps nowhere is the impact of corporate political power greater than on state-wide initiative campaigns. In 1976, the Massachusetts "bottle bill" initiative was defeated, 51 to 49 per cent. Proponents spent $59,000. Opponents spent over $1.5 million, 99 per cent of which was raised form corporate sources rather than from individuals...
What allows the theory such wide-ranging applications is its emphasis on qualitative rather than quantitative analysis. What matters is not when or not to what extent something will happen, but whether it will take place at all. Thus catastrophe theorists can claim to understand phenomena other mathematical approaches cannot explain: naturally-occuring discontinuities or "jumps." Since the time of Newton and Leibniz, founders of the calculus three centuries ago, mathematical models in science have been concerned with the regular rotation of planets, the gradual increase in pressure of a gas being heated and the continuously-changing velocity...
...possesses the simplicity and elegance that is so appealing to a mathematician. His model is based on principles of topology, a field ofter described as "rubber-sheet geometry" because it concerns forms that may be stretched or distorted without changing their fundamental, qualitative properties. Thom contends that for a wide range of mathematical structures; including almost all natural processes, only seven stable "unfoldings" can occur. By varying the number and arrangement of factors controlling these structures, he determined that apart from the seven "elementary" structures, all others are doomed to degenerate into unstable configurations...
...however, give ample consideration to objections to the theory: that it is incapable of making useful predictions; that it is so general and qualitative as to reveal nothing we don't already know; that alternative mathematical models already exist; and that its proponents have based their claims of its wide applicability on a few phenomena well-suited to the model. Finally, two of the harshest critics have charged that in substituting pure theory for "the hard work of learning the facts about the world," idealistic mathematicians have used the theory "deduce the world by thought alone...