Word: einstein
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...life is a simple thing that would interest no one," he told the first drove of reporters. But to Einstein's lasting astonishment, Americans were ready to idolize the shy professor with the eccentric look and demeanor that connoted "Genius." They read with fascination that money bored him (once he used a $1,500 check as a bookmark, then lost the book), that he was absent-minded (he once walked into the salon of a transatlantic liner wearing his pajamas), that his second wife, Elsa, once ate the orchids on her plate at a formal banquet, mistaking them...
...Einstein disliked the ballyhoo, but over the years he learned to make use of it. From his pedestal he occasionally poked a finger into worldly affairs. In the '30s he asked the Polish government to pardon draft dodgers. In the '50s he urged "the little minority of intellectuals" to refuse to testify before congressional committees, on the grounds that "it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition...
Bomb & Blast. Einstein was both a pacifist and a Zionist (in 1952 he was asked, but refused, to become the President of Israel). But as the Nazis destroyed the Jewish people, he made a decision that was to produce war's most destructive tool. One day in 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt. Nazi scientists, he said, might soon be able "to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium." "This requires action," F.D.R. said. Out of it came the Manhattan Project, and at last the atomic bomb...
When Albert Einstein got word of Hiroshima, he seemed unwilling to believe it. "Ach," he said sadly. "The world is not yet ready for it." As A-bomb led to H-bomb, and the atomic arms race began, he lent his prestige to almost any ban-the-bomb society that asked his sponsorship. Einstein's otherworldliness grew more pronounced. "The wish to withdraw into myself," he wrote, "increases with the years." But though his political forays were often Utopian, his scientific imagination still soared. He had unified the concepts of space and time, matter and energy, gravitation and inertia...
...Dice in the Cosmos. Einstein was convinced that the cosmos is an orderly, continuous unity: gravity and electro-magnetism must, therefore, have a common source. He was in a minority, for Planck's famed Quantum Theory, which Einstein himself did so much to develop, and which many modern scientists accept, suggests that the physical universe is made up of small particles (quanta) that are governed not by some orderly causality but by chance...