Word: explaining
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...affected simply by observing them. This made Einstein uncomfortable. As he famously and frequently insisted, "God does not play dice." (Retorted his friendly rival Niels Bohr: "Einstein, stop telling God what to do.") He spent his later years in a failed quest for a unified theory that would explain what appeared to be random or uncertain...
...Bang was that it was not compatible with quantum theory, the other great conceptual revolution of the early 20th century. The first step toward quantum theory came in 1900, when Max Planck, working in Berlin, discovered that the radiation from a body that was glowing red hot could be explained if light came only in packets of a certain size, called quanta. It was as if radiation were packaged like sugar; you cannot buy an arbitrary amount of loose sugar in a supermarket but can only buy it in 1-lb. bags. In one of his groundbreaking papers written...
...unpredictable element in the basic laws and never fully accepted quantum mechanics. His feelings were expressed in his famous God-does-not-play-dice dictum. Most other scientists, however, accepted the validity of the new quantum laws because they showed excellent agreement with observations and because they seemed to explain a whole range of previously unaccounted-for phenomena. They are the basis of modern developments in chemistry, molecular biology and electronics and the foundation of the technology that has transformed the world in the past half-century...
...announced he was suspending the wooden practice of requiring written questions submitted in advance. He promised to meet reporters twice a week and by and large kept his promise, holding nearly 1,000 press conferences in the course of his presidency. Talking in a relaxed style with reporters, he explained legislation, announced appointments and established friendly contact, calling them by their first name, teasing them about their hangovers, exuding warmth. Roosevelt's accessibility to the working reporters helped explain the paradox that though 80% to 85% of the newspaper publishers regularly opposed his policies, his coverage was generally full...
...Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature," argues Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler. "He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us but whether there is worse to come." The power of Hitler was to confound the modernist notion that judgments about good and evil were little more than matters of taste, reflections of social class and power and status. Although some modern scholars drive past the notion of evil and instead explain Hitler's conduct...