Word: likelies
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...20th century will be most remembered, like the 17th, for its earthshaking advances in science and technology. In his massive history of the 20th century, Paul Johnson declares: "The scientific genius impinges on humanity, for good or ill, far more than any statesman or warlord." Albert Einstein was more pithy: "Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity...
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...
...crowning glory, perhaps the most beautiful theory in all of science, was the general theory of relativity, published in 1916. Like the special theory, it was based on a thought experiment: imagine being in an enclosed lab accelerating through space. The effects you'd feel would be no different from the experience of gravity. Gravity, he figured, is a warping of space-time. Just as Einstein's earlier work paved the way to harnessing the smallest subatomic forces, the general theory opened up an understanding of the largest of all things, from the formative Big Bang of the universe...
...embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Albert Einstein's shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound--the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed...