Word: einsteins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After immigrating to the U.S. in 1933, Von Neumann was hired, along with Albert Einstein, by the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a nonprofit research institute set up by the Bamberger family with profits from their department stores. The I.A.S. proved to be the perfect intellectual playground for Von Neumann's boundless genius. He threw himself with enthusiasm into one intractable problem after another, ranging from the abstract mathematics of quantum mechanics to the practical problems of weather prediction, hydrology and the patterns of artillery fire...
Hubble went on to trump even that achievement by showing that this galaxy-studded cosmos is expanding--inflating majestically like an unimaginably gigantic balloon--a finding that prompted Albert Einstein to acknowledge and retract what he called "the greatest blunder of my life." Hubble did nothing less, in short, than invent the idea of the universe and then provide the first evidence for the Big Bang theory, which describes the birth and evolution of the universe. He discovered the cosmos, and in doing so founded the science of cosmology...
...When Einstein heard of Hubble's discovery, he was elated. More than a decade earlier, his new general theory of relativity had told him that the universe must either be expanding or contracting, yet astronomers had told him it was doing neither. Against his better judgment, Einstein had uglied up his elegant equations with an extra factor he called the cosmological term--a sort of antigravity force that kept the universe from collapsing in on itself...
...suddenly, the cosmological term was unnecessary. Einstein's instincts had been right, after all. His great blunder had been to doubt himself, and in 1931, during a visit to Caltech, the great and grateful physicist traveled to the top of Mount Wilson to see the telescope and thank Hubble personally for delivering him from folly...
...most succinctly, that children don't think like grownups. After thousands of interactions with young people often barely old enough to talk, Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly illogical utterances were thought processes that had their own kind of order and their own special logic. Einstein called it a discovery "so simple that only a genius could have thought...