Word: cannot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sleepless life of hide-and-seek. Though his protectors, the Taliban government in Afghanistan, still refuse to hand him over, he is constrained not to tick them off. The U.S. warned the Taliban again last week to expect harsh reprisals if bin Laden acts. They responded that he cannot even use fax or phone to direct his enterprises, but U.S. officials don't believe...
Last week the Vermont Supreme Court agreed with them, sort of. The court ruled, as no appellate court ever had, that gay couples have a right to the same benefits as heterosexual couples--with one monumentally symbolic exception. Same-sex couples still cannot obtain a marriage license...
...still at the patent office in Bern, but didn't begin to think seriously about the problem until he was at the German University in Prague in 1911. He realized that there is a close relationship between acceleration and a gravitational field. Someone in a closed box cannot tell whether he is sitting at rest in the earth's gravitational field or being accelerated by a rocket in free space. (This being before the age of Star Trek, Einstein thought of people in elevators rather than spaceships. But you cannot accelerate or fall freely very far in an elevator before...
General relativity also predicts that time comes to a stop inside black holes, regions of space-time that are so warped that light cannot escape them. But both the beginning and the end of time are places where the equations of general relativity fall apart. Thus the theory cannot predict what should emerge from the Big Bang. Some see this as an indication of God's freedom to start the universe off any way God wanted. Others (myself included) feel that the beginning of the universe should be governed by the same laws that hold at all other times...
...toward quantum theory came in 1900, when Max Planck, working in Berlin, discovered that the radiation from a body that was glowing red hot could be explained if light came only in packets of a certain size, called quanta. It was as if radiation were packaged like sugar; you cannot buy an arbitrary amount of loose sugar in a supermarket but can only buy it in 1-lb. bags. In one of his groundbreaking papers written in 1905, when he was still at the patent office, Einstein showed that Planck's quantum hypothesis could explain what is called the photoelectric...