Sentence examples for centripetal from inspiring English sources

The result is that the centripetal force the group once exerted has gone and we have returned to a situation similar to that of the old "pre-al-Qaida" days with a whole series of different local groups involved in local struggles with negligible central co-ordination.

This top-heavy state, the legacy of centripetal policies since the war, is no clunkier than the language of those keenest to reform it.

Yet falling transport costs have made this centripetal force less important over the past half-century, leaving many industrial cities, like Detroit, in deep trouble.Cities today have a productivity advantage for different reasons, to do with ideas rather than costs.

I found myself puzzled, as a centrifugal force is either fictitious (a physicist's trick to account for how a problem is framed) or is an opposing reaction to a centripetal force, in which case it, literally, leaves you going around in circles.

Policies were poor, execution dreadful and leadership misdirected, but each initiative seemed to create a centripetal force, as everyone looked toward Beijing to see how to march forward (or avoid being trampled).

FROM FISA to guns to welfare, Christopher Beam keeps tabs on Barack Obama's centripetal recalibrations.

With a pair of them spinning in opposite directions at twice the crankshaft speed, the centripetal forces the weights generate neutralise one another horizontally, but combine vertically to cancel out the second-order vibrations caused by the reciprocating pistons.

Whereas American politics, say, is often defined by centrifugal tensions, with Republicans and Democrats tugging in opposite directions, German politics is a mash-up of centripetal forces, with all the main parties struggling to occupy the centre.

This has created both centripetal and centrifugal forces, which are pushing computing into data centres (huge warehouses full of servers) and onto mobile devices businesses that Microsoft and Intel do not dominate.Other firms have leapt into the gap.

The modern circus came into being in England in 1768 when Philip Astley, a former sergeant major turned trick rider, found that if he galloped in a circle while standing on his horse's back, centrifugal and centripetal forces helped him to keep his balance.

Cognitive anthropologists have found this a helpful way to model, simultaneously, both the 'centripetal' forces of cultural reproduction and the competing 'centrifugal' processes of variation and inconsistency.