Word: einstein
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Physicists half jokingly call it the TOE--Theory of Everything. The idea is to describe all matter, all energy, all the fundamental forces of nature in one tidy, elegant set of equations. But it's so devilishly difficult that Einstein spent his last years in frustration trying to concoct just a partial solution to the problem...
That doesn't necessarily mean the theory is correct, of course. As Einstein's example makes clear, very smart people sometimes tilt at windmills. And even in the case of his greatest success, the General Theory of Relativity, Einstein had to wait patiently for experimentalists to go out and verify its predictions. Until they did, the theory was simply a set of clever equations. The same holds true today for superstring theory; unfortunately, it would take an atom smasher thousands of times as powerful as any on Earth to test it directly--at least in its current version...
...once they had transferred them to microfilm. He wrote letters, even sometimes sent the cover subject a gift as an enticement to sign. Among those who took the bait: Pablo Picasso, Joseph R. McCarthy, Herbert Hoover, Charles de Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek, Andy Warhol, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio, Hopalong Cassidy (actor William Boyd) and all four Marx Brothers...
Other Key Players: Ivy Pochoda '98, Ilana Einstein, '99, Brooke Herlihy '99, Leah Ramella '99, Lindsay Wilber '99, Stephanie Teaford...
PHENOMENON (July 3). The morphing is metaphorical here: a regular Joe (Travolta) is zapped with psychic powers and an Einstein IQ. Naturally, he's a freak to be avoided, except by one (Kyra Sedgwick) who loves him. Sounds sappy, but could work: director Jon Turteltaub has fashioned some improbable hits (Cool Runnings, While You Were Sleeping), and Travolta is a perpetual charm machine...