Word: einsteins
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Ever since Einstein, physicists have regarded the universe as four- dimensional. In addition to the three physical dimensions -- length, width and height -- there exists time, which is treated mathematically as though it were equivalent to the other three. But there is one important difference: while humans can travel freely in any physical direction -- up and down, left and right, back and forth -- they can go only forward in time, never backward...
Still, there is nothing in the laws of physics that says time cannot run backward. Einstein's equations of motion work equally well, mathematically, when the direction of time is reversed. Yet no one has ever been able to travel back in time. Theoretical physicists find the situation intriguing: if the laws that govern nature really permit time reversal, there should somehow be a way to achieve it. Now a theorist at Princeton University has come up with a way that travel into the past might, in principle, be accomplished, even if it may not be practical...
Home is a trap, but at school the kid shucks all that and really blossoms. She's everywhere. The school dances, the annual town parade, the pep squad, the pick of the boys. O.K., so she's not an Einstein, gradewise, but she gets a college degree and dumps that dreary town and her painful homelife and heads for the Big Time...
...physicist Alexander Simon has everything, including the Theory of Everything. His new, Nobel-size hypothesis ties up the movement of the tides and the invisible violence of the atom, the phenomenon of light and the drag of gravity. If only this young Einstein were a think-tank nerd, he could insulate himself from the challenges of academic inquiry and worldwide publicity...
There's even a twist to the papers. Although prose is welcome, fiction and poetry are equally valid genres in Layzer's courses. One student this past semester wrote a story about a cookie-making contest, whose participants included Albert Einstein and other famous physicists...