Word: einsteins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Sifting through old papers in a Dutch astronomy laboratory, scientists came across an unexpected treasure: 17 letters and postcards written by Albert Einstein between 1916 and 1918 to his friend the Dutch astronomer and mathematician Willem de Sitter. The discovery, reported in Nature, reveals an esoteric interchange between the two men about the theory of relativity. Einstein's observations range from the specific (he computed the radius of the universe as R=10' lightyears) to the metaphoric ("I compare space to a cloth ...") to the peevish ("Your solution corresponds to no physical possibility"). But the two scholars...
...with it. Of the 20 scientists most frequently mentioned by name in responses to the survey, only seven are living. Among them: Astronomer Fred Hoyle, Chemist Linus Pauling and Physicist John Taylor. The rest included such figures from the myth-laden past as Archimedes, Galileo, Marie Curie, Darwin and Einstein...
...born, in any event, right into comedy. Brooks was one of the four sons of Harry Einstein, a radio dialect comedian who performed under the name Parkyakarkus. At 15, Albert had got up his own act (a short-lived double with Joey Bishop's son Larry). At about the same time, he landed a job at KMPC in Los Angeles as a sportswriter; he made up most of the baseball scores. After studying acting for two years at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Tech, he took the family name of Brooks and became a TV comedy writer on a show...
...morality of Woodrow Wilson. It was Winslow Homer time, when, as Doctorow writes, "a certain light was still available along the Eastern seaboard." Eccentrics still putter in their garages and produce inventions without the aid of research-and-development bureaucracies. Henry Ford's new assembly line and Albert Einstein's peculiar idea that the universe is curved crack the dawn of the modern age. Before long, Doctorow notes, painters in Paris will be putting two eyes on one side of the head...
...speeches droned endlessly on, the white-haired scientist turned in despair to a fellow dinner guest and sighed: "I have just got a new theory of eternity." Albert Einstein's ennui at a function of the National Academy of Sciences was hardly unusual. Though the prestigious organization likes to consider itself the supreme court of American science, it has all too often resembled other self-perpetuating honor societies, like baseball's Hall of Fame or Hollywood's Oscar judges...