Word: alberts
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...CLASS ACT: Author Cheri Register sometimes tells people that her Ph.D from the University of Chicago stands for Packinghouse Daughter. That?s what she is - the daughter of a retired Wilson & Company millwright in a meatpacking pant in Albert Lea, Minnesota. That?s also the name of her new book, "Packinghouse Daughter" (Perennial/HarperCollins; paperback), a splendid memoir of her family?s blue-collar life in the 1950s, and the 109-day strike that divided the town...
...smack into the class divide when she went from small-town life in Albert Lea to the University of Chicago. "It was major culture shock," she says. "There were ways of life that I had read books about, and fantasized about, but never imagined were real. I discovered how ignorant I was of the culture with a capital C." But, she adds, "I caught on eventually to how ignorant and provincial those people were. They knew nothing of my life...
...were different, cooler, better, even if the tough guys and cheerleaders didn't know it. We cheered at the scene in Broadcast News where the young nerd (to become the grownup played by Albert Brooks) tells the lunkheaded bullies who beat him up at school that they'll never make more than $19,000 a year. We went to movies with names like Revenge of the Nerds--which even if no one knew it then were about exactly this new class division--then had our real-life nerds' revenge in the roaring...
Theoretical astrophysicists don't usually get involved in the nitty-gritty of spacecraft design, but Spergel is not your typical theorist. Even in a field in which the most brilliant minds are inevitably compared with Albert Einstein, Spergel stands out. Beginning as an undergraduate at Princeton in the early 1980s, he has navigated from one knotty problem to another--not as a dilettante academic dabbling at the edges but as a key player making important contributions at every turn...
...Albert Einstein never did turn relativity into what he always meant it to be - just one part of a "unified field theory," a single set of universal laws marrying the Newtonian and subatomic worlds. He died bemoaning the spread of probability-based quantum physics - "God does not play dice with the universe," he famously insisted - but he never could top it, and succeeding generations of scientists haven?t come much closer...