Word: brief
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pudgy first child of a bourgeois Jewish couple from southern Germany, he was strongly influenced by his domineering, musically inclined mother, who encouraged his passion for the violin and such classical composers as Bach, Mozart and Schubert. In his preteens he had a brief, intense religious experience, going so far as to chide his assimilated family for eating pork. But this fervor burned itself out, replaced, after he began exploring introductory science texts and his "holy" little geometry book, by a lifelong suspicion of all authority...
Professor Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, occupies the Cambridge mathematics chair once held by Isaac Newton
Over the years, enthusiasm for string theory has waxed and waned. It enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 1970s, but then most physicists stopped working on it. Theorist John Schwarz of Caltech and his colleague Joel Scherk of the Ecole Normale Superieure, however, persevered, and in 1974 their patience was rewarded. For some time they had noticed that some of the vibrating strings spilling out of their equations didn't correspond to the particles they had expected. At first they viewed these mathematical apparitions as nuisances. Then they looked at them more closely; the ghosts that haunted their equations...
...need not choose between these visions. Both are true. Both are untrue. What we need to do is wonder at how firmly this brief, incredibly fecund period set the terms of the cultural argument that would preoccupy the rest of the century. The shock of the new drew much of its reshaping, revolutionary force from frustration with outworn artistic conventions and had been gathering strength and energy out of repression and dismissal for at least 50 years...
...make metal casts of the individual letters of the alphabet. The advantages of such a method were obvious, or must have been to Gutenberg. Equipped with a sufficient supply of metal letters, a printer could use and reuse them in any order required, running off not just handbills and brief documents but a theoretically infinite number of individual pages. There were technical obstacles to overcome, including the discovery of an alloy that would melt at low temperatures, so that it could be poured into letter molds, and of an ink that would crisply transfer impressions from metal to paper...