Word: einsteins
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...long axis wheels around the sun. The wheeling motion was too fast to fit astronomical theories, and astronomers tried to account for this speedup in ingenious ways: e.g., the influence of an undiscovered planet between the sun and Mercury. None of their explanations worked. But in 1915, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. Then all was -relatively- simple. According to Einstein, a body gains mass as it gains speed. When Mercury is approaching the sun on its elliptical orbit, it speeds up a lot. This makes it slightly more massive and makes its orbit wheel faster...
...even after the "Einstein correction" has been allowed for, Mercury does not keep appointments accurately. This year Mercury crossed the sun about 20 seconds too soon, and the experts are now trying to figure out why. Astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper of the University of Chicago believes that the chief reason is the inaccuracy of man's fundamental timepiece, the revolution of the earth on its axis. For many reasons, including the drag of the tides and the little-understood motions of fluids in its interior, the turns of the earth vary slightly. This makes the earth a capricious clock...
Although he has won several prizes for his past work, the National Academy Prize, in 1949, the first Einstein prize in 1951, a medal from Columbia in 1951 ("They were supposed to give me an honorary degree, but I was too young"), Schwinger believes that his present work will be the most significant. To a layman he can explain it only in generalities. The gist of his effort is to force modern physics to a showdown. The present physical theories are so complicated that they need an enormous amount of experimental work to check their validity. Schwinger aims to recast...
Says Bestor: "It is a curiously ostrich-like way of meeting life needs to de-emphasize foreign languages during a period of world war and postwar global tension, and to de-emphasize mathematics at precisely the time when the nation's security has come to depend on Einstein's equation...
Baron also emphasized the intellectual contributions of his race. He said, "Jewish pioneers of the brain such as Philo, Spinoza, and Einstein, were just as important as the pioneers of brawn who brought material advancement with them wherever they wandered...