Word: einstein
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Over the years, EB has assembled a formidable array of authors. Lord Macaulay is still there with his article on Sam Johnson; so is Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, with his piece on Mary, Queen of Scots. Einstein has written on spacetime, and H. L. Mencken on Americanism; Shaw wrote on socialism, Trotsky on Lenin. But Editor Yust sometimes travels far from the world of doctorates and Nobel Prizes. For his expert on nightclubs, he picked the Stork Club's Sherman Billingsley; for boxing, Gene Tunney; for rodeo, Cowboy "Foghorn" Clancy...
There are other examples, based on far less apocryphal stories, of the process doing some good. Einstein's skeptical attitude towards Newton's is one; the geometricians' distrust of Euclid is another. Bentham refused to accept the "natural laws, natural rights," theories of previous economists; Susan B. Anthony skeptically disagreed with the idea that only men could vote. None of these people claimed to be right or wrong in the absolutist sense of Father Feeney; they simply questioned the status quo. And in every case their questioning has helped mankind along. As long as man keeps on scratching his head...
Continuous Creation. According to Einstein's relativity, four-dimensional space (three dimensions plus time) is in a sense "curved," and its curvature and therefore its "size" depend on the amount of matter within it. If more matter were added, space would have to stretch, carrying the galaxies with it. Why not, asked Bondi and Gold, figure out how much matter would have to be added to make the galaxies recede at the observed rate? The answer, dragged from thickets of mathematics, came out very simple. One atom of hydrogen, they calculated, must be added to each quart of space...
Finances were indirectly responsible for the embryo college's first major controversy. In 1946, the two founding groups had asked Albert Einstein to let his name be used in the fund raising drive. The Einstein Foundation for Higher Learning became the first main money-seeking branch. When Goldstein became involved in a dispute with the scientist, the Rabbi resigned. This...
When in the next year the trustees set out to elect a president of the University, Einstein supported Harold Laski, professor at the London School of Economics. But the board desired an American educator and Einstein, displeased, dropped his name from the list of the school's supporters. In 1948 the Board elected Sachar as president of Brandeis. Then retired, Sachar had been an important educator--a recipient of Cambridge University's first Ph.D. degree--and for 14 years the head of Hillel Foundations...