| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from U. S. Project Trinity Report by Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer: On 7 May 1945 at 0437 hours, 200 LASL scientists and technicians
exploded 100 tons of conventional high explosives at the test site.
The explosives were stacked on top of a 20-foot tower and contained
tubes of radioactive solution to simulate, at a low level of activity,
the radioactive products expected from a nuclear explosion. The test
produced a bright sphere which spread out in an oval form. A column
of smoke and debris rose as high as 15,000 feet before drifting
eastward. The explosion left a shallow crater 1.5 meters deep and 9
meters wide. Monitoring in the area revealed a level of radioactivity
low enough to allow workers to spend several hours in the area (3;
12).
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: beast who owned them might be standing upon a ledge within
the cave, or that it might be rearing up upon its hind legs;
but I had seen enough of the monsters of Pellucidar to know
that I might be facing some new and frightful Titan whose
dimensions and ferocity eclipsed those of any I had seen before.
Whatever it was, it was coming slowly toward the entrance
of the cave, and now, deep and forbidding, it uttered a low
and ominous growl. I waited no longer to dispute possession
of the ledge with the thing which owned that voice.
The noise had not been loud--I doubt if the Sagoths heard
it at all--but the suggestion of latent possibilities
At the Earth's Core |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: Amphitryon had a twenty-fifth ancestor, who might have been anybody, and
was such as fortune made him, and he had a fiftieth, and so on? He amuses
himself with the notion that they cannot count, and thinks that a little
arithmetic would have got rid of their senseless vanity. Now, in all these
cases our philosopher is derided by the vulgar, partly because he is
thought to despise them, and also because he is ignorant of what is before
him, and always at a loss.
THEODORUS: That is very true, Socrates.
SOCRATES: But, O my friend, when he draws the other into upper air, and
gets him out of his pleas and rejoinders into the contemplation of justice
and injustice in their own nature and in their difference from one another
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