Word: eddington
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...mankind's most reassuring cosmic thinkers died last week. Death came at 61 to cool, unruffled Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, Cambridge University astronomer, in a Cambridge nursing home...
...scientists, Sir Arthur was affectionately known as the senior partner in the firm of "Eddington & [Sir James] Jeans, Interpreters of the Universe." Shy, neat, reed-nosed Sir Arthur looked precisely like the British university don he was, and he discoursed on his cosmic subject with a wit and clarity rare among scientists. He set down in brook-clear language a masterly simplification of Einstein's theory of relativity, spent most of his life explaining the enigmas of abstract science for the benefit of laymen (The Nature of the Physical World, The Expanding Universe). He enlivened these lessons with attempts...
...nose-grinding laymen, Eddington's vast conceptions were somehow vastly comforting. He once predicted that the expanding universe, "this ball of radio waves," would end in "one stupendous broadcast," but gave assurance that this event would not take place for perhaps 90 billion years. As for man, Eddington dismissed him as "one of the gruesome results" of a cosmic accident by which "some lumps of matter of the wrong size have occasionally been formed...
Errol Flynn, a yacht, and a girl again made news. Nora Eddington, 19, recently an aircraft worker, was cruising with him off Acapulco, Mexico. Word got around that they were married. Actor Errol denied it; so did Nora. Her mother, who works in a Los Angeles bakery, told reporters that Nora had said "she didn't know whether she loved him for himself, or whether she just was in love with his glamor. So I kissed her good-by and I haven't heard from her since...
...believe that literature or philosophy are essentially more "liberal subjects" than science or math. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of education today is the cleavage between science and "the humanities." We have no more Leonardos or Goethes. Anyone who has studied the history of science, or read Whitehead or Eddington can testify to their superior value as general training for the mind, over an intensive course in German grammer, or a study of literary names and dates...