Word: einsteins
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Disciples of Piaget have a tolerance for--indeed a fascination with--children's primitive laws of physics: that things disappear when they are out of sight; that the moon and the sun follow you around; that big things float and small things sink. Einstein was especially intrigued by Piaget's finding that seven-year-olds insist that going faster can take more time--perhaps because Einstein's own theories of relativity ran so contrary to common sense...
...dark, compact man with mischievous gray-blue eyes, Fermi was the son of a civil servant, an administrator with the Italian national railroad. He discovered physics at 14, when he was left bereft by the death of his cherished older brother Giulio during minor throat surgery. Einstein characterized his own commitment to science as a flight from the I and the we to the it. Physics may have offered Enrico more consolatory certitudes than religion. Browsing through the bookstalls in Rome's Campo dei Fiori, the grieving boy found two antique volumes of elementary physics, carried them home and read...
Godel the man was every bit as eccentric as his theories. He and his wife Adele, a dancer, fled the Nazis in 1939 and settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked with Einstein. In his later years Godel grew paranoid about the spread of germs, and he became notorious for compulsively cleaning his eating utensils and wearing ski masks with eye holes wherever he went. He died at age 72 in a Princeton hospital, essentially because he refused to eat. Much as formal systems, thanks to their very power, are doomed to incompleteness, so living...
...Shockley at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., observed that when electrical signals were applied to contacts on a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input. Shockley was not present at that first observation. And though he fathered the discovery in the same way Einstein fathered the atom bomb, by advancing the idea and pointing the way, he felt left out of the momentous occasion...
...intellectual triumphs of our century, which stems from what is called quantum physics, is the understanding of how very high temperatures can create matter. Temperature is inseparable from radiation. Even in empty space, radiation has energy, and thanks to Einstein's special theory of relativity we know that energy is equivalent to mass, or matter. Laboratory scientists have been turning electromagnetic radiation into mass since the 1930s. (The inverse of that process, turning mass into energy, makes nuclear bombs...