Word: dinger
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...quantum physics, are both, by comparison with the first guess, hard, complex, dry and repellent. The first shock of the object's real nature, breaking in on our spontaneous dreams of what that object ought to be, always has these characteristics. You must not expect Shrödinger to be as plausible as Democritus; he knows too much. You must not expect St. Athanasius to be as plausible as Mr. Bernard Shaw: he also knows too much...
Last week, from nonscientific Dublin, of all places, came news of a man who not only understands Einstein, but has bounded like a bandersnatch far ahead (he says) into the hazy, electromagnetic infinite. Austrian-born Nobel Prizewinner Erwin Schrödinger, of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, claims to have generalized still further Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. If so, he has scored a scientific grand slam: mathematical physicists (including Einstein himself) have been trying to do this, without success, for the last 30 years...
Schrödinger believes that his new theory "should express everything in field physics." It should also, he says, reduce Einstein's theory to a special case, just as Einstein's theory reduced Newton's laws of motion. Like all such high-flown scientific theories, Schrödinger's consists of a complex equation expressed in mathematical symbols. To the nonscientific, it looks like incomprehensible doodling (see cut of theory in Schrödinger's own hand...
Even Schrödinger seemed not entirely comfortable with it yet. "I believe I am right," he announced. "I shall look an awful fool if I am wrong...
...never a bridesmaid," but now it was obvious that he would never lead another. Said he: "I hate like hell for this to happen so early. But I'll be all right. I'll see you back on States-side and we'll throw a whiz-dinger." Said the brigadier general: "No man in the shape he's in has a right to look so well and talk so normally...