Word: einstein
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...located in a cluttered wooden house in Austin, Texas. While Mrs. O'Hair holds down the "bishop's" job, her "divinely inspired" husband will double as the "prophet" in residence. Poor Richard's Church will even canonize its own saints: Mark Twain, Mme. Curie, Albert Einstein and other luminaries...
...more than half a century, textbooks have hailed an 1887 experiment performed by the American scientists Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley as the inspiration for Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity. The two Americans showed that the speed of light is constant despite the motion of its source, a puzzling result that defied the Newtonian physics of the time, but was later explained by Einstein's equations. Yet was Einstein actually guided toward his epochal achievement by the Michelson-Morley experiment? After combing the Einstein archives at Princeton, Physicist-Historian Gerald Holton concludes that...
...When Einstein died in 1955, he left 25 cabinets filled with personal memorabilia. These documents, Holton writes in the American Journal of Physics, include a number of letters in which Einstein speaks of the influence of the experiment on the formulation of his theory: this influence is always described in such words as "negligible," "rather indirect" or "not decisive." Furthermore, toward the end of his life, Einstein appears to have become increasingly determined to demolish the myth. In an unpublished letter written only a year before his death, Einstein said: "I even do not remember if I knew...
Then how did the misconception arise? In part, says Holton, because of Einstein's own generous tributes to Michelson and Morley, whose work-in retrospect-provided the only experimental confirmation of relativity for many years. But most of the blame rests with the scientific community itself. By trying to fit the evolution of one of the most important scientific concepts of the 20th century into a neat logical sequence, Holton says, textbook writers (himself included) have nurtured what he calls the "experimenticist fallacy": the false notion that theory always flows directly from experiment. In the process, he says, they...
...celestial bodies, he said, the movement and position of electrons cannot be precisely determined. Only the statistical probability of their position can be ascertained with accuracy. The idea was brilliantly elaborated by Bern's colleague, Werner Heisenberg, but it provoked serious challenge. Even Bern's old friend, Einstein, with whom he often played violin sonatas, did not believe that particle motion-or, indeed, any basic phenomena in nature-was so completely in the grip of chance. "God may be subtle," said Einstein, "but he is not malicious...