aesthetics: Three approaches to aesthetics: …held to be involved in aesthetic experience. Thus, in the seminal work of modern aesthetics Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; The Critique of Judgment), Immanuel Kant located the distinctive features of the aesthetic in the faculty of “judgment,” whereby we take up a certain stance toward objects, separating them from our…

learning theory: Contemporary trends in learning theory: …early 1930s the distinction between learned and inherited behaviour seemed clearer than it does now. The view that any bit of behaviour either was learned or simply developed without learning seemed straightforward. Studies based on these expectations led investigators to conclude that rat-killing behaviour among cats is learned rather than…

Christianity: Faith and reason: The enlarged concept of experiencing-as (developed by the British philosopher John Hick) refers to the way in which an object, event, or situation is experienced as having a particular character or meaning such that to experience it in this manner involves being in a dispositional state to behave in…

John Bloomfield Jervis: …this post he designed the Experiment (1832), the first locomotive to have four of its six wheels mounted on a swiveling truck. This radical innovation enabled the Experiment to reach speeds of up to 96 km (60 miles) per hour, making it the fastest locomotive in the world.

spaceflight: Kinds of spacecraft: An experiment capsule is a small unmanned laboratory that is often recovered after its flight. A space station is an artificial structure placed in orbit and equipped to support human habitation for extended periods.

H.G. Wells: Middle and late works: …in the reminiscences of his Experiment in Autobiography (1934).

Andrew Bell: …of his Madras system in An Experiment in Education (1797), but his ideas had little popularity in England until they were adapted by Joseph Lancaster in a school opened at Southwark in 1801 and by Robert Owen in New Lanark, Scotland. (See monitorial system.) Meanwhile, Bell was made rector of…

Hilary Mantel: …for the clear-eyed coming-of-age novel An Experiment in Love (1995). Three years later she returned to historical fiction with The Giant, O’Brien, which imaginatively explores and contrasts the lives of two real 18th-century figures—a freakishly tall sideshow performer steeped in the Irish oral tradition and a Scottish surgeon in thrall…

Blake Edwards: Films of the 1960s: Experiment in Terror (1962), a suspenseful crime story with Lee Remick and Glenn Ford, preceded Edwards’s next significant film, Days of Wine and Roses (1962), which had originated in 1958 as a Playhouse 90 television production. Lemmon and Remick starred in this harrowing account of…

Jacques Tourneur: Films of the 1940s at RKO: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and Out of the Past: Experiment Perilous (1944) was a gothic thriller set in 1903 New York featuring Hedy Lamarr; it provided Tourneur with plentiful opportunities to demonstrate his mastery of shadowy menace. He then was loaned to Universal to direct Canyon Passage (1946), a western starring Dana Andrews and…

Wilbur Olin Atwater: …the first director of the Office of Experiment Stations (1888–91).

Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), organization dedicated to supporting and promoting recreational aviation around the world. The EAA has members from more than 100 countries and more than 1,000 local chapters. Membership is open to anyone interested in aviation, but chapters must be

Walther Nernst: Early research: …Regel und der Thermodynamik (1893; Experimental and Theoretical Applications of Thermodynamics to Chemistry), in which he stressed the central importance of Avogadro’s law, thermodynamics, and both physics and chemistry in the treatment of chemical processes.

breeder reactor: …first experimental breeder reactor, designated EBR-1, was developed in 1951 by U.S. scientists at the National Reactor Testing Station (now called Idaho National Engineering Laboratory), near Idaho Falls, Idaho. France, Great Britain, Japan, and the Soviet Union subsequently built experimental breeders. Although interest in breeder reactors waned after the 1960s…

nuclear reactor: From production reactors to commercial power reactors: A much larger experimental breeder, EBR-II, was developed and put into service (with power generation) in 1963.

genetics: Experimental breeding: Genetically diverse lines of organisms can be crossed in such a way to produce different combinations of alleles in one line. For example, parental lines are crossed, producing an F1 generation, which is then allowed to undergo random mating to produce offspring that…

New York Film Festival: …Projections in 2014), devoted to experimental film, was introduced. Other recurring subcategories, including Spotlight on Documentary and Convergence, were introduced throughout the 2010s.

statistics: Experimental design: Data for statistical studies are obtained by conducting either experiments or surveys. Experimental design is the branch of statistics that deals with the design and analysis of experiments. The methods of experimental design are widely used in the fields of agriculture, medicine, biology,…

John A. List: …contributions to the fields of experimental and behavioral economics. He helped to popularize the use of field experiments as viable tools for analyzing a broad set of economic questions. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Wilhelm Roux: …made him a founder of experimental embryology.

Marshall Hall: In his Experimental Essay on the Circulation of the Blood (1831), he was the first to show that the capillaries bring the blood into contact with the tissues.

New York Film Festival: …Projections in 2014), devoted to experimental film, was introduced. Other recurring subcategories, including Spotlight on Documentary and Convergence, were introduced throughout the 2010s.

Edward Davy: Davy, who wrote an Experimental Guide to Chemistry (1836), emigrated in 1839 to Australia, where, in addition to practicing medicine, he worked as an editor, farmer, and factory manager. Before leaving Great Britain he sold the patent for his telegraph; the purchasers never exploited the invention commercially, and for…

John Dewey: Instrumentalism of John Dewey: …Dewey, was the importance of experimental inquiry. Peirce, for example, praised the scientific method’s openness to repeated testing and revision of hypotheses, and he warned against treating any idea as an infallible reflection of reality. In general, pragmatists were inspired by the dramatic advances in science and technology during the…

Vincent Joseph Schaefer: …snow, initiating the science of experimental meteorology and weather control.

scientific method, mathematical and experimental technique employed in the sciences. More specifically, it is the technique used in the construction and testing of a scientific hypothesis. The process of observing, asking questions, and seeking answers through tests and experiments is not unique to

climate classification: Empirical classifications: Most empirical classifications are those that seek to group climates based on one or more aspects of the climate system. While many such phenomena have been used in this way, natural vegetation stands out as one of prime importance. The view held by…

philosophy of art: Analysis of representation: …book Le Roman expérimental (1880; The Experimental Novel) and has been occasionally held (though not practiced) by painters reacting against Romanticism, such as the 19th-century French artist Gustave Courbet. Zola advocated a novel that resembled a scientific investigation into reality. Plot was to be of no importance, rather an aspect…

petrology: Petrology includes the subdisciplines of experimental petrology and petrography. Experimental petrology involves the laboratory synthesis of rocks for the purpose of ascertaining the physical and chemical conditions under which rock formation occurs. Petrography is the study of rocks in thin section by means of a petrographic microscope (i.e., an instrument…

Epcot, theme park in the Walt Disney World Resort, near Orlando, Florida, that features many attractions centred on the advancement of technology. As Walt Disney initially imagined it, Epcot was to be a self-contained city that would incorporate the newest technologies. Following Disney’s death in

Edward B. Titchener: …far the most important was Experimental Psychology, 4 vol. (1901–05), consisting of two student manuals and two teachers’ manuals. Designed to drill students in laboratory method, the manuals were patterned on those used in qualitative and quantitative experiments in chemistry.

experimental psychology, a method of studying psychological phenomena and processes. The experimental method in psychology attempts to account for the activities of animals (including humans) and the functional organization of mental processes by manipulating variables that may give rise to

education: Progressive education: …ideas into practice to establish experimental schools during the last decade of the 19th century and in the early 20th century. The principal experimental schools in America until 1914 were the University of Chicago Laboratory School, founded in 1896 and directed by John Dewey; the Francis W. Parker School, founded…

Western philosophy: Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon: The term experimental science was popularized in the West through his writings. For him, human beings acquire knowledge through reasoning and experience, but without the latter there can be no certitude. Humans gain experience through the senses and also through an interior divine illumination that culminates in…

Frederic Edward Clements: …new lines of research, notably experimental taxonomy. For Clements, experimental taxonomy meant using transplant experiments and other ecological methods to investigate evolutionary processes and to improve the classification of plants. Together with American botanist Harvey Monroe Hall, Clements wrote an influential introduction to this interdisciplinary area of research, The Phylogenetic…

Efua Sutherland: …Experimental Theatre, which became the Ghana Drama Studio, and directed the University of Ghana’s traveling theatre group. The Drama Studio produced a number of her plays, including the well-known Foriwa (1962), a play which stresses the alliance of new ways and old traditions, and Edufa (1967), based on Alcestis by…

experimental unit, in an experimental study, a physical entity that is the primary unit of interest in a specific research objective. Generally, the experimental unit is the person, animal, or object that is the subject of the experiment. Experimental units receive different treatments from one

instrumentalism, in the philosophy of science, the view that the value of scientific concepts and theories is determined not by whether they are literally true or correspond to reality in some sense but by the extent to which they help to make accurate empirical predictions or to resolve conceptual

biology: The history of biology: …test the hypotheses by appropriate experiments. The most original and inquiring mind is severely limited without the proper tools to conduct an investigation; conversely, the most-sophisticated technological equipment cannot of itself yield insights into any scientific process.

Western literature: The 20th century: …difficult to judge, that radical experimentation characterized many fields of literature, and that traditional forms of writing were losing their definition and were tending to dissolve into one another. Novels might acquire many features of poetry or be transformed into a kind of heightened nonfictional reportage, while experimentation with typography…

Benjamin Franklin: Achievements and inventions of Benjamin Franklin: …in an 86-page book titled Experiments and Observations on Electricity. In the 18th century the book went through five English editions, three in French, and one each in Italian and German.

William Harvey: Later life: …Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium (Exercises on the Generation of Animals), it is believed that Harvey attempted to take his own life with laudanum (an alcoholic tincture of opium). However, this attempt failed. On June 3, 1657, at the age of 79, he died of a stroke.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Appiah’s other nonfiction books included Experiments in Ethics (2008), The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010), and The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (2018). He also wrote the novels Avenging Angel (1991), Nobody Likes Letitia (1994), and Another Death in Venice (1995).

acoustics: Modern advances: Békésy’s book Experiments in Hearing, published in 1960, is the magnum opus of the modern theory of the ear.

Henri Tajfel: Perceptual accentuation: …revealed in a 1970 paper, “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination,” in which he explored the concept of social categorization (the classification of people as members of social groups) as a basis for intergroup discrimination (discrimination by members of one group against members of another group). In contrast to realistic group-conflict theory,…

Carl I. Hovland: …work formed the basis for Experiments on Mass Communication (1949), with Arthur A. Lumsdaine and Fred D. Sheffield as coauthors.

Joseph Black: Alkalinity research and fixed air: …paper of his career, “Experiments upon Magnesia Alba, Quicklime, and Some Other Alcaline Substances,” given to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1755. The earlier series of experiments for his thesis were conducted on magnesium salt and, for the first time, consisted of a planned cyclic series of quantitative…

Jan Ingenhousz: …chemical effects of plant physiology, Experiments upon Vegetables, Discovering Their Great Power of Purifying the Common Air in Sunshine, and of Injuring It in the Shade and at Night. The English chemist Joseph Priestley had already shown that plants restore to the air a property necessary to—but destroyed by—animal life.…

Gregor Mendel: Theoretical interpretation: His paper “Experiments on Plant Hybrids” was published in the society’s journal, Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereines in Brünn, the following year. It attracted little attention, although many libraries received it and reprints were sent out. The tendency of those who read it was to conclude that Mendel…

evidence: Expert evidence: Expert witnesses must have specialized knowledge, skill, or experience in the area of their testimony. For the most part, they do not testify concerning facts but draw inferences from them. With a few exceptions, they are treated in Anglo-American law as ordinary witnesses…

expert system, a computer program that uses artificial-intelligence methods to solve problems within a specialized domain that ordinarily requires human expertise. The first expert system was developed in 1965 by Edward Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg of Stanford University in California, U.S.

thought: Expert thinking and novice thinking: Research by the American psychologists Herbert A. Simon, Robert Glaser, and Micheline Chi, among others, has shown that experts and novices think and solve problems in somewhat different ways. These differences explain why experts are more effective than novices in…

Germany: Economy of Germany: The Board of Experts for the Assessment of Overall Economic Trends, established in 1963 and known as the “five wise men,” produces an evaluation of overall economic developments each year to assist in national economic decision making. Moreover, the federal government submits an annual economic report…

John Travolta: Grease, Urban Cowboy, and career decline: …Kelly Preston, his costar in The Experts (1989); she died from breast cancer in 2020. They had three children: Jett, Ella Bleu, and Benjamin. Jett died in 2009 at age 16 after a seizure caused him to fall and hit his head at the family’s vacation home in The Bahamas.

Alexandre Decamps: …of all his works is The Experts (c. 1837), a clever satire of the jury of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which had rejected several of his earlier works.

punishment: Retribution: …punishment is a kind of expiation: offenders should undergo punishment in their own interests to discharge their guilt and to make themselves acceptable to society again.

speech: Respiratory mechanisms: …inhalation (inspiration) and exhalation (expiration). Inspiration and expiration are equally long, equally deep, and transport the same amount of air during the same period of time, approximately half a litre (one pint) of air per breath at rest in most adults. Recordings (made with a device called a pneumograph)…

explanation, in philosophy, set of statements that makes intelligible the existence or occurrence of an object, event, or state of affairs. Among the most common forms of explanation are causal explanation (see causation); deductive-nomological explanation (see covering-law model), which involves

Robert Pinsky: His long poem An Explanation of America (1979) probes personal and national myths. Vivid imagery characterizes his other collections, which include History of My Heart (1984), The Want Bone (1990), The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems (1996), Jersey Rain (2000), Gulf Music (2007),

Joseph Black: Industrial consultant: …concerning an industrial process, “An Explanation of the Effect of Lime upon Alkaline Salts,” which was published in Home’s Experiments on Bleaching (1771). Another approach to the bleaching problem was to look for a cheaper way of making potash. Cullen turned his mind to this and was rewarded by…

Henry More: …views, most fully expressed in An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660) and Divine Dialogues (1668), centred on his idea of reconciling Christian Platonism with 17th-century science. His ethical writings include Enchiridion Ethicum (1667); his work An Antidote against Atheism (1652) is curiously devoted, in large part, to…

Ireland: The Restoration period and the Jacobite war: The Act of Explanation (1665) obliged the Cromwellian settlers to surrender one-third of their grants and thus provided a reserve of land from which Roman Catholics were partially compensated for losses under the Commonwealth. This satisfied neither group. Catholics were prevented from residing in towns, and…

Ŭisang: …he wrote his major work, An Explanatory Diagram on the Garland World System, which elicited high acclaim from his master and is still read widely in the Buddhist circles of East Asia. On returning home in 671, he built, sponsored by King Munmu, the Pusŏk Temple as the centre of…

profanity, language that is considered socially offensive due to being vulgar, obscene, or irreverent. The term profanity is often used in a religious sense to refer to language that is blasphemous, sacrilegious, or sometimes merely secular. In a broader sense, profanity is often referred to as

explication de texte, a method of literary criticism involving a detailed examination of each part of a work, such as structure, style, and imagery, and an exposition of the relationship of these parts to each other and to the whole work. The method was originally used to teach literature in France

François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon: …Guyon, however, Fénelon responded with Explication des maximes des saints sur la vie intérieure (1697; “Explanation of the Sayings of the Saints on the Interior Life”). Defending Madame Guyon’s integrity, Fénelon not only lost Bossuet’s friendship but also exposed himself to Bossuet’s public denunciation. As a result, Fénelon’s Maximes des…

explicit, in bookmaking, a device added to the end of some manuscripts and incunabula by the author or scribe and providing such information as the title of the work and the name or initials of its author or scribe. Explicits were soon incorporated into or completely replaced by the colophon, which

plea bargaining: …formal agreements are termed “explicit plea bargains.” However, some plea bargains are called “implicit plea bargains” because they involve no guarantee of leniency. Explicit bargains are the more important of the two.

manakin: In others, called exploded leks, males are separated by much larger distances (sometimes up to several hundred metres), and females must wander from one male to another to choose their mates. Males that form exploded leks typically have extremely loud vocalizations that ring through the forest for hundreds…

Can the Cold Really Cause Trees to Explode?: …structure within a plant) to burst. Some of these “explosions” are by design: A number of plants (including milkweed, touch-me-nots, squirting cucumbers, and blue violets) use the pressure built up in their tissues over a period of growth to launch their seeds over considerable distances. Other explosions are caused by…

class consciousness: …instance, the experience of economic exploitation can lead workers to recognize that they have a stake in each other’s well-being, and from there they will develop class consciousness and class solidarity. Mann’s focus was placed on consciousness itself and thus departed to some extent from Marx’s attempt to embed consciousness…

community ecology: Types of competition: …faster than their competitors (exploitation competition). Some plant species, for example, are able to extract water and nutrients from the soil faster than surrounding species. In other cases, the two species physically interfere with one another (interference competition) by aggressively attempting to exclude one another from particular habitats.

al-Jāḥiẓ: …by writing essays such as Manāqib at-turk (Eng. trans., “Exploits of the Turks,” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1915), a discussion of the military qualities of the Turkish soldiers, on whom government policy depended.

dramatic literature: Western theory: … (1595) and Ben Jonson in Timber (1640) merely attacked contemporary stage practice. Jonson, in certain prefaces, however, also developed a tested theory of comic characterization (the “humours”) that was to affect English comedy for a hundred years. The best of Neoclassical criticism in English is John Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie,…

Henri Duveyrier: …returning to France he published Exploration du Sahara: Les Touâreg du nord (1864; “Exploration of the Sahara: The Tuareg of the North”).

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: …serious work on astronautics, “Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices,” which dealt with theoretical problems of using rocket engines in space, including heat transfer, a navigating mechanism, heating resulting from air friction, and maintenance of fuel supply.

European exploration, exploration of regions of Earth for scientific, commercial, religious, military, and other purposes by Europeans, beginning about the 4th century bce. The motives that spur human beings to examine their environment are many. Strong among them are the satisfaction of curiosity,

Thomas Baines: …his drawings and his book Explorations in South-West Africa (1864) were based. With his fame established, he opened a studio in London in 1865. Returning to Africa in 1868, he led an expedition to explore the goldfields of Matabeleland, where in 1870 he won a mining concession from the Ndebele…

San Francisco: Cultural institutions: Housing the Exploratorium (a science museum), the palace is a giant Neoclassical rotunda, which was designed by the architect Bernard Maybeck and completely restored in the 1960s. The Walt Disney Family Museum, celebrating the life and work of the animation pioneer, producer, and showman, was opened in…

statistics: Exploratory data analysis: Exploratory data analysis provides a variety of tools for quickly summarizing and gaining insight about a set of data. Two such methods are the five-number summary and the box plot. A five-number summary simply consists of the smallest data value, the first…

exploratory surgery, manual and instrumental means of investigating an area of the body suspected of disease when a specific diagnosis is not possible through noninvasive or simple biopsy techniques. If the lesion is in the abdomen, exploratory surgery involves a laparotomy, or incision into the

According to Ernst van de Wetering, in his biography of Rembrandt van Rijn in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Rembrandt was “an artist who favoured an uncompromising realism that would lead some critics to claim that he preferred ugliness to beauty.” What was never ugly, however, was Rembrandt’s mastery

Internet Explorer (IE), World Wide Web (WWW) browser and set of technologies created by Microsoft Corporation, a leading American computer software company. After being launched in 1995, Internet Explorer became one of the most popular tools for accessing the Internet. There were 11 versions

Explorer, any of the largest series of unmanned U.S. spacecraft, consisting of 55 scientific satellites launched between 1958 and 1975. Explorer 1 (launched Jan. 31, 1958), the first space satellite orbited by the United States, discovered the innermost of the Van Allen radiation belts, two zones

balloon flight: Balloons reach the stratosphere: That balloon, the Explorer II, was seven times the size of Piccard’s, but still with very similar fabric. The stress in the skin of the giant balloon was formidable, resulting in repeated failures. On one occasion the crew, this time including Maj. William E. Kepner, barely escaped by…

Training montages, victories snatched from the jaws of defeat, plucky underdogs, wizened but wise coaches, Big Races, Big Fights, and Big Games…lots and lots of Big Games: This is the stuff of sports movies, or at least the clichés. But there is often more to movies about sports than first meets

Like hiking? Then come and explore the plants and animals of seven of the world’s major mountain ranges! From the towering Himalayas to the austere Atlas Mountains, mountain ecosystems are chock full of interesting organisms. Often considered biological hotspots, many of these regions feature life

David Fairchild: >Exploring for Plants (1930), an account of the Allison Vincent Armour expeditions for the USDA, and the autobiographical The World Was My Garden (1938).

stop: …the hold (occlusion); and the release (explosion), or opening of the air passage again. A stop differs from a fricative (q.v.) in that, with a stop, occlusion is total, rather than partial. Occlusion may occur at various places in the vocal tract from the glottis to the lips; stops are…

volcano: Explosions: Massive volcanic explosions are caused by the rapid expansion of gases, which in turn can be triggered by the sudden depressurization of a shallow hydrothermal system or gas-charged magma body or by the rapid mixing of magma with groundwater. The ash, cinders, hot fragments,…

blast injury: …primarily from exposure to an explosion. Blast injuries may be inflicted by waves traveling in gases, liquids, or solids. The first is exemplified by the air blast caused by bomb explosions. Underwater blasts may originate from torpedoes, mines, and depth charges. Solid blast is the effect of a pressure wave

volcano: Other volcanic structures and features: …rock type, or genesis; and explosion crater, a large circular, elongate, or horseshoe-shaped excavation with ejected debris on its rim or flanks. A somma volcano, named for Mount Somma, a ridge on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius in Italy, is a caldera partially filled by a new central cone. In…

Alejo Carpentier: …Carpentier published another historical novel, El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral), which chronicles the impact of the French Revolution on Caribbean countries. It was very successful and there were calls to award Carpentier a Nobel Prize, something that eluded him. In his final years Carpentier turned to…

combustion: The chemical reactions: …or three pressures, called the explosion limits, may correspond to one temperature. The mechanism of the reaction determines the explosion limits: the reaction can proceed only when the steps in the sequence of reactions occur faster than the terminal steps. Thus, for combustion to be initiated with light or with…

chain reaction: So-called branching chain reactions are a form of chain reaction in which the number of chain carriers increases in each propagation. As a result the reaction accelerates very rapidly, sometimes being completed in less than 1/1,000th of a second. This condition sometimes is referred to as…

Mo Yan: in Explosions and Other Stories). His romantic historical story Honggaoliang (1986; “Red Sorghum”) was later published with four additional stories in Honggaoliang jiazu (1987; “Red Sorghum Family”; Red Sorghum). It won him widespread fame, especially after its adaptation into a film of the same name (1987).

explosive, any substance or device that can be made to produce a volume of rapidly expanding gas in an extremely brief period. There are three fundamental types: mechanical, nuclear, and chemical. A mechanical explosive is one that depends on a physical reaction, such as overloading a container

explosive: Explosive bonding: Explosives are sometimes used to bond various metals to each other. For example, when silver was removed from United States coinage, much of the so-called sandwich metal that replaced it was obtained by the explosive bonding of large slabs, which were then rolled…

fuse: …is usually embedded in the explosive charge. Detonating cord, also called Cordeau and Primacord, is a hollow cord filled with an explosive material. It is fired by a detonator and is capable of initiating the detonation of certain other explosives at any number of points and in any desired pattern.

chemical industry: Nitric acid: Another explosive ingredient is ammonium picrate, derived from picric acid, the relationship of which appears more clearly in its systematic name, 2,4,6-trinitrophenol.