Word: eddington
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Robert V. Pound, professor of Physics, and Glen A. Rebka Jr. '53 will share the 1965 Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for their experiments helping to confirm Einstein's Principle of Equivalence...
...sheer bed-living room farce, A Severed Head is manipulated cleverly and performed with skill. Heather Chasen as Antonia cat-licks laughs off her lines, and Paul Eddington as the pietistic psychoanalyst arcs his body in gestures of helpfulness, as if he were physically proffering mental health. As the anthropologist, Sheila Burrell looks like a shrunken head that has been restored to lifesize, and Robin Bailey's Martin, while a trifle actorish, is very much the passive modern vacuum-hero into whose life trouble rushes...
...distictly uncomfortable. Is it important to a cosmology that the natural constants remain constant? If so, why is it? If we can't decide whether it's crucial? why not? The questions are not trivial; the answers aren't obvious. Newman has begged them, then passed judgement on Eddington's contributions without indicating where he stands on the points of difference with other theories...
...find rather easily, in fact, that Eddington's absolute constant of 137 began as 136. Eddington added a unit when that value became inconsistent with better experimental values of the electron charge and the speed of light. Max Born's Experiment and The-Physics gently dissects Eddington under an aegis that most critics want to share: evaluation of what seems reasonable and what seems unreasonable. I have the feeling that Newman, with his long experience mathematics, could also have something interesting to say about Eddington's attempt to fit the constants of nature to a Procrustean bed of positive integers...
NEWMAN'S approach to Eddington is not an extreme example of his distressingly glib judgments in Science Sensibility. The point is typified by a remark in one of the earlier essays: "I agree entirely with Bertrand that intellectually Pythagoras was one of the most important men that ever lived, both when he was wise and when he was unwise.'" We're by now with the notion that and unwisdom generate scientific progress. But it is one thing to say that one scientist's mistakes send another in the right direction, and quite another that unwisdom in a wayward scientist presents...