Word: einsteins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Meanwhile the narration is uninspired, surprisingly so given the grace of Lightman's writing in Einstein's Dreams. There, his use of sparse, simple language served him well allowing him to suggest possible worlds through short, carefully chosen phrases, quick touches of color, and imaginative details. In Good Benito, however, his language falls flat and his colors seem drab...
Alan Lightman's second published work of fiction, Good Benito, feels a lot like a first novel. Arguably it is, since this book reads much more like a novel than did Lightman's 1993 book Einstein's Dreams, a series of fictional meditations on time. It seems probable that Good Benito is, like many first novels, fairly autobiographical, since the book tells the story of a physicist, Bennett Lang, who grows up in Memphis, Tennessee and then comes to the East Coast, while Lightman grew up in Memphis and teaches physics at M.I.T. But the real reason the book feels...
...EINSTEIN'S BIGGEST BLUNDER: Even at an optimum age of 12 billion years, the universe is too young to accommodate 14 billion-year-old stars, so even the radical step of abandoning the inflation theory might not be enough to resolve the age crisis. But there could be a solution that allows inflation to remain. All the theorists have to do is throw out another of their cherished beliefs: that Einstein was right when he repudiated his concept of a cosmological constant. Says Princeton physicist Jim Peebles: "People hate the cosmological constant. I used to hate...
They might have to. The constant can be thought of as a kind of universe-wide repulsive force, a sort of antigravity. Einstein thought that he needed it in his general relativity theory to balance the pernicious influence of gravity. Without a cosmological constant, said the equations, the universe would have to be either contracting or expanding-which it didn't seem to be. It was only when Edwin Hubble discovered, a decade later, that it was indeed expanding that Einstein dropped the constant like a hot potato...
...Cruz colleague, "suddenly the cosmological constant would kick in, gunning the expansion, making it faster." Measuring a large Hubble Constant and an apparently low age today, in other words, wouldn't be a reliable indicator of what was going on earlier in the universe's lifetime. Theorists might hate Einstein's abandoned child, but, says John Huchra, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, "to an experimentalist it seems no more ad hoc than inflation...