Word: lighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Satori Kato Instant coffee, 1901 Mary Anderson Windshield wipers, 1903 Hugh Moore Paper cup, 1908 Jacques Brandenberger Cellophane, 1908 Arthur Wynne Crossword puzzle, 1913 Joseph Block Whistling kettle, 1921 Andrew Olsen Pop-up tissue box, 1921 George Squier Muzak, 1922 Garrett A. Morgan Traffic light, 1923 Francis W. Davis Power steering, 1926 R. Stanton Avery Self-adhesive label, 1935 Edwin L. Peterson Answering machine, 1945 Earl John Hilton Credit card, 1950 Clinton Riggs Yield sign, 1950 Chavannes & Fielding Bubble wrap, 1957 Luther Simjian ATM, 1960 Herb Peterson Egg McMuffin...
During his spare time as a young technical officer in a Swiss patent office in 1905, he produced three papers that changed science forever. The first, for which he was later to win the Nobel Prize, described how light could behave not only like a wave but also like a stream of particles, called quanta or photons. This wave-particle duality became the foundation of what is known as quantum physics. It also provided theoretical underpinnings for such 20th century advances as television, lasers and semiconductors...
...based, like much of Einstein's work, on a thought experiment: if you could travel at the speed of light, what would a light wave look like? If you were in a train that neared the speed of light, would you perceive time and space differently...
Einstein's conclusions became known as the special theory of relativity. No matter how fast one is moving toward or away from a source of light, the speed of that light beam will appear the same, a constant 186,000 miles per second. But space and time will appear relative. As a train accelerates to near the speed of light, time on the train will slow down from the perspective of a stationary observer, and the train will get shorter and heavier. O.K., it's not obvious, but that's why we're no Einstein...
Einstein went on to show that energy and matter were merely different faces of the same thing, their relationship described by the most famous equation in all of physics: energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, E=mc2. Although not exactly a recipe for an atomic bomb, it explained why one was possible. He also helped resolve smaller mysteries, such as why the sky is blue (it has to do with how the molecules of air diffuse sunlight...