Word: einsteinã
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Michael Beard’s life is a series of contradictions. He is a Nobel Laureate, but also a scientific fraud. He is the chief of a climate research center, but doesn’t believe in global warming. Riding on the coattails of his own youthful contribution to Einstein??s groundbreaking work, Beard is thoroughly dissatisfied with his life and disillusioned with the society that continues to laud him for the sole professional achievement he made decades ago. Ian McEwan’s latest novel introduces Beard just as his fifth marriage is dissolving, when an accident...
...successes: Those sound more like accessible middle-class values than like the innate inspiration or providential favor once attributed to exceptional persons. Indeed, as much as Americans treasure the idea of genius—“Baby Genius” and “Baby Einstein?? CD lines offer ambitious mothers-to-be the chance to transform their prenatals into intellectuals—we shy away from the suggestion of any hidden Mozarts in our midst...
...field of research, the quest for a unified theory, is no stranger to uncertainty. A unified theory seeks to meld Einstein??s theory of gravity, a framework that’s relevant when things are large, with quantum mechanics, a body of laws that come into play when things are small. We’ve known for half a century that each of these models works well in its own domain, but each also proclaims that the other is defective. Melding the warring antagonists is essential to gaining insight into other great mysteries—what happened...
...Surely, this could be called a reactionary’s utopian fantasy (I prefer to think of it as an anarchist’s utopian fantasy). It may also be objected that what I am actually recommending is the country’s dissolution. I recall Einstein??s story of a colleague who, in response to the sage scientist’s fervent pleas for nuclear disarmament, quipped: “Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?” I’ll never plunge into such depths of misanthropic...
...while in certain areas of the world homosexuals are still hanged, rape victims stoned, and women forbidden to drive a car or receive an education. It would be a mistake, in this précis of progress, to omit the cultural accomplishments that bestowed our civilization its sublimity. From Einstein??s almost mystical insights into the four-dimensional structure of space and time to the discovery of the universal template of organic life in the elegant double helix of the DNA molecule, Western science has illuminated the vastest contours and the most infinitesimal particles of the universe...