Word: einstein
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ever figured out precisely why Stephen Hawking's first popular book, A Brief History of Time, has been such a gigantic success, selling an astonishing 10 million copies since it was published in 1988. One possibility is that readers thought they were hearing from the greatest physicist since Einstein, and maybe the greatest of all time (Hawking himself declared that comparison "rubbish" in a TIME interview several years ago, and most of his colleagues agree with him). Another, more plausible reason is the public's fascination with a man who is utterly immobilized by the degenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis...
...clique of head scientists by illustrating the lengthy process and mounds of evidence that changed his own view on the correctness of that Standard Model. He debunks claims that science changes with time and culture, arguing that the physics of today is the same physics of Maxwell or Einstein at the turn of the century, only more detailed. Though we have much more accurate explanations of physical phenomena, Newton’s laws of nature remain logical simplifications of them, and are indeed still the first things taught to high school students...
Critics have accused science of being “culturally biased,” arguing that our scientific “laws” would be different if, say, Einstein had been Chinese or Newton had been a woman. They argue that while an external reality might exist, the methods by which we judge it are dominated by a clique of scientists trained in the Western tradition, scientists who have taken it upon themselves to be the arbiters of “objective truth...
...what is going on out there (no matter what Paul Krugman says), and linguists are groping in the dark for foundations as well. But the wild days before the structure of DNA, or before an expanding universe, or before the periodic table, or before Chomsky, Turing, Darwin, Keynes and Einstein are long gone. The great men and their great discoveries have sucked the exhilarating marrow out of the great fields of science. All we do now is stand on their shoulders to collect stamps that nature has stuck to the ceiling...
...Rushdie says that he has been “trying to write a short novel for years,” and is proud to have finally succeeded), though there are still several juicy cameos: Schlink, the Jewish U-boat plumber (“Erect, wiry, with Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth”), or Beloved Ali the taxi driver (“Hey! American man! You are a godless homosexual rapist of your mother’s pet goat”). Some of these seem to go astray: Perry Pincus, seducer of Eng Lit. celebs...