Word: einsteins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Albert Einstein, conceivably the last good man in this deconstructed century of failed gods and crumpled myths, is in woman trouble. A small band of scholars is claiming that much of the early work that made him famous, including, perhaps, the theory of relativity, should have been credited to his wife. The accusation would sound comical if it weren't tragic. This is Einstein, our most revered symbol of genius. We've all grown up with the vision of the humble patent examiner who overturned physics, with his corona of white hair and the sad deep eyes that have seen...
...know why? A childhood accident? Family tragedy? Does he find it sexy, affecting? Mileva Maric was a dark- haired Serbian woman who dreamed of being a physicist, a pre-feminist fighter, 21 when she entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. There she met Albert Einstein, a 17-year-old bohemian with thick curly hair and dark, warm eyes, bedroom eyes. They became lovers, sharing classes, textbooks and his father's disapproval. In 1902 they had an illegitimate daughter, who disappeared. Albert and Mileva married. Revolution was in the air, and they were the first modern couple...
...shadow, a housewife with two sons to raise, while he pursued general relativity -- the notion that gravity could be explained as "curved" space-time. They separated in 1914 and eventually divorced. As part of his alimony, he promised his future Nobel Prize money and delivered three years later. Einstein remarried and moved to America. Mileva and the kids were on their own. One son died in a mental institution, unvisited by his father; the other became an engineering professor. Mileva died in 1948, never having published a scientific paper under her own name...
...speculation until 1964, when an Irish theoretical physicist named John Stewart Bell restated the problem as a simple mathematical proposition. A young physicist named John Clauser came upon Bell's theorem and realized that it opened the door to testing the two-photon problem in an experiment. Like Einstein, Clauser was bothered by the seemingly absurd implications of quantum mechanics. Says Clauser, now a research physicist at the University of California, Berkeley: "I had an opportunity to devise a test and see whether nature would choose quantum mechanics or reality as we know it." In his experiment, Clauser, assisted...
Clauser's work pointed out once again that the rules of quantum mechanics do not mesh well with the laws of Newton and Einstein. But most physicists do not see the apparent disparity to be a major practical problem. Classical laws work perfectly well in explaining phenomena in the visible world -- the motion of a planet or the trajectory of a curveball -- and quantum theory does just as well when restricted to describing subatomic events like the flight of an electron...