^^
27.
When faced with things that are too big to sense, we comprehend them by adding knowledge to the experience.
The first appearance of a shining star in a darkening evening sky can take you out into the universe if you
combine what you see with the twin facts that the star is merely one of the closest of the galaxy’s 200 billion stars and that its light began traveling decades ago. The smell of gasoline going into a car’s tank during a refueling stop, when combined with the fact that each day nearly a billion gallons of crude oil are refined and used in the United States, can allow our imagination to spread outward into the vast global network of energy trade and politics.
28.
The first experiments in television broadcasting began
in France in the 1930s, but the French were slow to
employ the new technology. There were several reasons
for this hesitancy. Radio absorbed the majority of state resources, and the French government was reluctant to shoulder the financial burden of developing national networks for television broadcasting. Television
programming costs were too high, and program output correspondingly low. Poor distribution combined with minimal offerings provided little incentive to purchase the new product. Further, television sets were priced beyond the means of a general public whose modest living standards, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, did not allow the acquisition of luxury goods.
Ideological influences also factored in; elites in particular were skeptical of television, perceiving
it as a messenger of mass culture and Americanization.
29.
A violin creates tension in its strings and gives each of them an equilibrium shape: a straight line. A tight violin string can be viewed as composed of many individual pieces that are connected in a chain as in the above two figures. When the string is straight, as in
Figure 1, its tension is uniform, and the two outward forces on a given piece sum to zero; they have equal magnitudes and point in opposite directions. With no net forces acting on its pieces, the string is in equilibrium.
But when the string is curved, as in Figure 2, the outward forces on its pieces no longer sum to zero.
Although the string’s uniform tension still gives those outward forces equal magnitudes, they now point in slightly different directions, and each piece experiences a zero net force. The net forces on its pieces are
restoring forces, which will cause the string to vibrate and thus make sounds.
