Word: einstein
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since well before Albert Einstein, physicists have been conjuring up concepts that defy common sense. Consider just a few of the far-out notions now accepted by the scientific community: clocks that tick slower when they ride on rockets, black holes with the mass of a million stars compressed into a volume smaller than that of an atom, and subatomic particles whose behavior depends on whether they are being watched...
...idea of wormholes comes directly from the accepted concepts of general relativity. In that theory, Einstein argued that very massive or dense objects distort space and time around them. One possible distortion is in the form of a tube that can lead anywhere in the universe -- even to a spot billions of light-years away. The name wormhole comes about by analogy: imagine a fly on an apple. The only way the fly can reach the apple's other side is the long way, over the fruit's surface. But a worm could bore a tunnel through the apple, shortening...
...galactic void or deep within the vessels and sinews of the human body: " 'Watch what's coming.' All eyes turned ahead. A blue- green corpuscle was bumping along ahead of them." Some follow the adventures of Sherlock Holmes in outer space; some track the steps of Albert Einstein in his Princeton office: "He could not believe that the universe would be so entirely in the grip of chance. 'God may be subtle,' he once said. 'But he is not malicious...
...tendency to feel that knowledge must be gained from a structural source also creates an alienating process which restricts independent thought. As a child, Albert Einstein's poor academic performance led his teachers to think that he was mentally retarded. In reality, he was simply uninspired by the whole experience...
...Physicists' knowledge of the subatomic particles that make up atoms, the bits that constitute the particles and the forces that bind them all together depends on accelerators -- and the bigger the better. The reason: the best way to produce particles for study is to create intense bursts of energy. Einstein's discovery that matter and energy are equivalent guarantees that such bursts will spontaneously transform themselves into particles of matter. The SSC would make these extremely concentrated energy bursts by using its magnets to guide protons, moving at nearly 186,000 miles per second, around the enormous ring in opposite...