Word: einstein
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...That's the reason there is no prize for pure mathematics, not--as the oft-told myth has it--because a prominent mathematician ran off with Nobel's girlfriend.) Over the past century, the Nobel committees have, by and large, done right by their eponym. Winners have included Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Niels Bohr. But the prize has not always succeeded in covering itself--or its recipients--in glory. Nobel-worthy achievements have been overlooked. Dubious science has been rewarded--and later debunked. And some of the people honored with a Nobel have, truth be told, behaved less than...
DIED. ABRAHAM PAIS, 82, physicist and science historian; in Copenhagen. After surviving Nazi persecution in Holland, Pais conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Later in life he won broad acclaim for his biography of Albert Einstein and essays on other scientists...
...Riess saw something weird: the number he was getting for the slowdown kept coming out negative. The universe wasn't slowing down; it was speeding up! "This seemed to imply," he says, "that some force is acting against gravity." Crazy as antigravity sounds, the idea was originally suggested by Einstein as a kind of add-on to his General Theory of Relativity...
...this playful way, the 31-year-old native of Buenos Aires has been able to suggest a way to knit together two theories previously thought to be incompatible: quantum mechanics, which deals with the universe at its smallest scales; and Einstein's general theory of relativity, which deals with the very largest. Even as an undergraduate at Argentina's Instituto Balseiro, Maldacena had been intrigued by the idea that a bridge spanning the two might be constructed using string theory--so called because it assumes the fundamental constituents of matter are not pointlike particles but tiny, vibrating loops of string...
Beyond that, things get murky. It's not yet clear, for example, when tau enters the picture. Up to now, most thought the tangles form much later than the plaques. But neuroscientist Peter Davies of Albert Einstein College of Medicine thinks this view will be proved wrong. He believes some still unidentified biochemical event precedes the formation of tangles and plaques, perhaps a malfunction in the machinery that puts proteins together. "The question from the therapeutic standpoint," he observes, "is, What's responsible for the symptoms of disease? What's killing the cells? Is it amyloid...