And yet following Mandela's release from prison in 1990, something altered.
Well, just about everyone in "Featherstone" does, and all in the course of 48 hours: "Something altered in her mind to make things different from before".
Mr. Crain's 20-something alter ego may be uninformed on such matters, but "Necessary Errors" seems exceptional among recent American novels in how smartly it turns over the economic metaphors in so much American thinking.
But it's not only the hurly-burly of family life that's changed Josh: something else altered him, something awful and deeply poignant, something we see at close quarters in his film.
But something alters, or distils, when he paints from photographs he has taken himself.
And as the physicists who tried to create Maxwell's quantum demon know (see article), merely looking at the quantum-mechanical state of something alters it, from being a weird "superposition" of mutually exclusive classical states (such as pointing up or down) to being one or the other of them.
"So if something alters that metabolism or the cell-death signaling pathways, you would expect this is going to have impacts on the full range of diseases.
"Now we can do something to alter what might have been our genetic destiny," he added.
"Photography has become democratic – anyone with a digital camera can shoot something and alter it in Photoshop to make it look polished.
This is one of the duo's best collaborations and it's one where you can almost see the workings: a situation and characters would be set, then they'd come up with something to alter the scene's natural course.
The outcome might have been different had Fellaini pulled a goal back midway through the second half with United's best opportunity, but a reaction save by Jack Butland meant it was just another shot on target, not something to alter the scoreline.
