Word: effect
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...largest commemorations will be held next month at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where Einstein spent his last 22 years, and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which he helped found. "It's an avalanche effect," says Relativist Peter G. Bergmann of Syracuse University, one of Einstein's old collaborators. "Everyone wants to snatch a bit of reflected glory." Says Cambridge University's Martin Rees: "Einstein is the only scientist who has become a cult figure, even among scientists...
...faintest idea of the recent progress in nuclear physics, but after a briefing by Szilard and Wigner he agreed to write a letter to President Roosevelt alerting him to the possibility that the Nazis might try to make an atomic bomb. That letter is popularly credited (though its precise effect is unclear) with helping to persuade Roosevelt to order up the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic weapons...
...despite the fact that they may be the most distant objects in the universe. Pulsars, or neutron stars, have also been detected; these highly compressed cadavers of massive stars usually signal their existence by their highly regular radio beeps. Even stranger are the giant stars that may have in effect gone down the cosmic drain: those elusive black holes, with gravitational fields so powerful that not even light can escape them. Astronomers have also picked up what may be the echo of the Creation. Coming from everywhere in the skies, and in a sense from nowhere at all, these faint...
...Einstein's new relativistic world, both time and distance are equally fickle and depend on the relative motion of observers. The only absolute remaining is the speed of light. Out of this theorizing emerged some bizarre conclusions about the effect of so-called relativistic speeds, those near the velocity of light. As an observer on earth, for example, watches a spacecraft move away at about 260,000 km (160,-000 miles) per second, time aboard the ship (assuming he is able to see the ship's clock) seems to him to move at only half the rate that it would...
Einstein published two other landmark reports in Annalen der Physik during 1905. One paper explained a laboratory curiosity called the photoelectric effect, which occurs when a light beam hits a metallic target and causes it to give off electrons. (This phenomenon makes possible a host of today's electronic gadgetry, ranging from electric-eye devices to TV picture tubes and solar panels for spacecraft.) In this paper Einstein borrowed from a theory by German Physicist Max Planck, who had solved a vexing problem about the radiation of heat and light from hot objects by proposing that this radiant energy...