Word: einsteins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...instruments were telling him. There on the screen was a dense knot of something that had appeared in a cloud of rubidium atoms. Finally, Cornell had to acknowledge that it could mean only one thing: he and his colleagues had created a new form of matter, predicted by Albert Einstein more than 70 years ago but never before seen on earth. Called a Bose-Einstein condensate, it is a kind of "superatom," in which individual atoms lose their separate identities and merge into a single entity...
...physicists' excitement comes partly from the intellectual pleasure of seeing an important scientific loose end tied up at last. When Einstein first suggested the idea of BEC back in the 1920s, building on the work of the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, quantum mechanics was a new and controversial field. Among its stranger assertions -- long since confirmed -- was that atoms and other elementary particles can also be thought of as waves. The waves are really waves of probability, which describe where an atom is most likely to be at a given moment (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle dictates that...
...Einstein argued that as atoms approach absolute zero (-459.67 degrees F), the waves expand and finally overlap; the atoms merge into a single "quantum state." It's extraordinarily difficult to get them to 180 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, though -- the point at which the merging occurs. Thus the Boulder group's feat was a technical as well as a scientific...
Since the passage of the 1991 ordinanceAckerley has stopped using the billboards forcommercial ads, instead donating the space forpublic service announcements or using the boardsfor non-commercial speech. Four years ago, itstarted a "quote campaign," with aphorisms byluminaries such as Albert Einstein and the Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King...
Maybe Lightman will write such a novel, one that conveys, in the enchanting prose of Einstein's Dreams, the strange culture of all-too-human physicists--a difficult task, since Lightman's style has so far shown itself much better suited to fanciful speculation than to plot and character. But the seeds are there; they just don't bear fruit in Good Benito...