"Once the telegraph got installed, suddenly it mattered to keep track of time in New York and Pittsburgh," he went on.
"But with respect to the use of alcohol, it's an enormously important matter to keep it out of the firehouse, to eradicate it".
"I assume there might be more impetus, as a practical matter, to keep people on the reservation if they are harder to replace," said Don Collins, a New York University Law School professor.
For decades, astrophysicists have known that galaxies don't contain enough ordinary matter to keep themselves from whirling apart.
Astronomers know that galaxies need the extra gravity from dark matter to keep their constituent stars from flying off into space.
"They have to eat a huge amount of vegetable matter to keep themselves going and if you look at any of the places that the beavers have been they have created quite a lot of devastation".
That suggests a sort of pragmatic atomism viz., atoms being merely arbitrary epistemological stopping points in the analysis of matter to keep the mind from entertaining the dizzying thought of dividing without end.
Some have downplayed the matter to keep good relations with Washington.
