Word: einsteinian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week, in an announcement that excited physicists round the world, University of Massachusetts Astronomer Joseph H. Taylor added new weight to the Einsteinian case. At a gathering of astrophysicists in Munich, Taylor reported indirect experimental evidence affirming a major tenet of general relativity: the existence of gravitational waves. Predicted by Einstein, but never positively detected, this elusive radiation is the carrier of gravity, just as light waves are the carriers of electromagnetism, another of the universe's basic forces...
...sensitive computerized clocking device capable of detecting orbital timing changes of only one fifty-millionth of a second. This superaccurate timer revealed that in those four years the orbital period of the objects had decreased a total of four ten-thousandths of a second. That was exactly on the Einsteinian mark. Said Taylor: "We don't claim to have detected gravitational waves themselves, but simply proved they exist...
Unlike Laplace's dark star, this Einsteinian black hole?the name was not coined by Physicist Wheeler until the 1960s?had far more finality. Since relativity forbids anything to move faster than light, an idea unknown in classic Newtonian physics, escape was impossible. All the energy in the world could not extract an object from a black hole...
...late 1960s, as a research fellow at Cambridge, he and a colleague, Roger Penrose, showed more convincingly than ever before that if Einsteinian general relativity is correct, gravitational collapse will result in "singularities" that are totally hidden inside black holes. But Hawking did not stop there. Following up the work of John Wheeler's student, Jacob Bekenstein, he pointed out that there are important mathematical analogies between the bizarre otherworld of black holes and the familiar physical rules of thermodynamics, notably the idea of entropy-which says, in effect, that the universe is running down like an unwinding clock...
...perceiving any movement, so any dance gesture is equivalent to any other. This dissolution of hierarchy, the refusal to impose any arbitrary order on the intrinsic patterns of movement, is reflected elsewhere in Cunningham's art. Tomkins has likened his use of the stage to "a continuum, an Einsteinian field in which the dancers relate not to fixed points...but to one another," and most Cunningham dances can be viewed to almost equal advantage from any angle. There is no hierarchy of dancers, either: they interact, in critic McDonagh's phrase, with "molecular individuality." As with Cunningham's approach...