Word: bec
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...supposed to be harder in life than to watch your friends become very successful. But when I visit Erich and Max, instead of being consumed by jealousy, I slip into the flow of discussion, debating what kind of weaponry a Paladin should wield or the advantages of the bec de corbin over a standard battle ax. The nuances of games come naturally to me. And spending time with them takes me back to those afternoons at play. That's what these guys do all day, play games. For a moment, I regret the path I took, of becoming a writer...
...physicists' excitement comes partly from the intellectual pleasure of seeing an important scientific loose end tied up at last. When Einstein first suggested the idea of BEC back in the 1920s, building on the work of the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, quantum mechanics was a new and controversial field. Among its stranger assertions -- long since confirmed -- was that atoms and other elementary particles can also be thought of as waves. The waves are really waves of probability, which describe where an atom is most likely to be at a given moment (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle dictates that...
Does any of this have any practical use? Perhaps. Beams of BEC atoms might be used to inscribe exquisitely small circuits onto the ultra-compact electronic chips. The atoms might also be put to work in ultra-precise atomic clocks. So far, the list of applications is not very long. But, says Oxford's Burnett, "it's like the beginnings of laser technology. It's a solution in search of a problem." Given the thousands of ways lasers are used today, that sounds pretty promising...
...sales much. "The New Yorker has almost a reverse chauvinism against anything made in New York," Frank says. "I have shipped more wine to Tokyo than to New York City." Chaddsford's Eric and Lee Miller have been luckier in persuading local restaurants, including Philadelphia's highly rated Le Bec-Fin, to serve their wines; since 1982, production has increased from 3,000 to 22,000 cases annually...