Word: einstein
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Klein's essay vividly illustrated Einstein's famous saying that imagination is more important than knowledge. Rice's performance before the 9/11 commission showed her to be smart but ultimately not a big thinker. Even more appalling is Bush's claim that he would have done something if he had known exactly when and where al-Qaeda would strike. The statement makes plain the Administration's failure to appreciate that the mishandling of the threat from al-Qaeda was not a failure of intelligence but a failure of imagination. Michael H. Weiss Marina...
...business. In his book Hollywood Economics, economist Arthur De Vany analyzed 2,015 movies to determine what succeeds and what fails. The answer, best summarized by screenwriter William Goldman, is that "nobody knows anything." What De Vany did learn is that moviegoers behave according to the principles of Bose-Einstein condensation--a fancy way of saying they are more likely to go to a movie if they receive an "authentic signal" that other people have enjoyed it. Before a movie opens, studios can generate inauthentic signals by securing a star and advertising heavily, creating the impression of a phenomenon. This...
...Albert Einstein labored unsuccessfully for decades to create a theory that would merge relativity and quantum physics into one tidy mathematical package. But where Einstein failed, physicists may finally be on the verge of success, largely thanks to Edward Witten, generally considered the greatest theoretical physicist in the world. "Ed is unique," says John Schwarz, a theorist at Caltech, "the kind of person who comes along once a century...
...soft-spoken Witten, 52, didn't even set out to be a scientist. He majored in history at Brandeis and originally planned to be a journalist but ended up getting a Ph.D. in physics instead. By the mid-1980s, some of his colleagues had decided that the answer to Einstein's failed dream was to treat the building blocks of matter--quarks, photons, electrons and such--as minuscule, vibrating strings of energy rather than as particles. But superstring theory was considered no more than an esoteric and eccentric subspecialty until Witten (by this time a full professor at Princeton) turned...
What sort of contributions? Don't ask, unless twistor-space methods and Yang-Mills theories are your cup of tea. But if Witten's string theory is right, it means that the quest Einstein began to find the ultimate laws of the universe may nearly be over. The proof, however, may still be many years off. Witten once called string theory "a bit of 21st century physics that somehow dropped into the 20th century." If so, Witten clearly has the 21st century mind to handle it. --By Michael Lemonick