Word: einstein
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Person of the Week LAST LAUGH More than 70 years ago, Albert Einstein calculated a force in the universe that works opposite to gravity: instead of pulling objects together, it pushes them apart. The idea was so wild he later refuted it, but Hubble telescope images of an exploding star have proven him right...
...Albert Einstein never did like the idea of antigravity. It wasn't that he had a problem with farfetched notions. After all, his special and general relativity theories made the astonishing assertion that time, space and matter could be squeezed and stretched like so much India rubber. The trouble was that some sort of antigravity force--Einstein called it the "cosmological term"--was required to make the predictions of general relativity match what astronomers believed the actual universe looked like. And that extra term marred the mathematical elegance of his beloved equations. The great physicist was hugely relieved when...
...might have been a bit too hasty. Last week scientists made a powerful case that Einstein's blunder may actually have been another Nobel-worthy prediction. Using the Hubble Space Telescope to find and study a distant supernova--an exploding star-- astronomers from two rival research teams have jointly gathered the strongest evidence yet that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up, like a rocket with its throttle wide open. And that means something is pushing...
...Fragments speak in an eerily contemporary voice. Heraclitus anticipated Einstein's theory that energy is the essence of matter: "All things change to fire,/and fire exhausted/falls back into things." The metaphor of Heraclitean fire posits an absolutely unstable world, in constant flux, consuming and creating, the alternation and reconciliation of day and night, waking and sleeping, life and death, wet and dry, good and evil. "What was cold soon warms,/and warmth soon cools./So moisture dries,/and dry things drown." And "The earth is melted/into the sea/by that same reckoning/whereby the sea/ sinks into the earth...
...those few of us who do recognize Pi Day--and celebrate it separately from Albert Einstein's birthday, which is also March 14--will continue on our own, taking in its honor 3.14 slow drinks from a perfectly cylindrical mug. And we will imagine better times, when the whole nation (nay, the world) can join in a truly universal holiday--when 3/14 will...