Word: mading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...great missed opportunities of theoretical physics. If Einstein had stuck with his original equations, he could have predicted that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. As it was, the possibility of a time-dependent universe wasn't taken seriously until observations were made in the 1920s with the 100-in. telescope on Mount Wilson. These revealed that the farther other galaxies are from us, the faster they are moving away. In other words, the universe is expanding and the distance between any two galaxies is steadily increasing with time. Einstein later called the cosmological constant the greatest mistake...
...emerge from the Big Bang. Some see this as an indication of God's freedom to start the universe off any way God wanted. Others (myself included) feel that the beginning of the universe should be governed by the same laws that hold at all other times. We have made some progress toward this goal, but we don't yet have a complete understanding of the origin of the universe...
...only now has the rest of physics begun to catch up. A new generation of physicists has at last taken on the challenge of creating a complete theory--one capable of explaining, in Einstein's words, "every element of the physical reality." And judging from the progress they have made, the next century could usher in an intellectual revolution even more exciting than the one Einstein helped launch in the early 1900s...
What would Einstein have made of such wild imaginings? Columbia's Greene, for one, thinks he would have loved them. After all, Greene notes in his recently published book, The Elegant Universe, Einstein played around with the idea of extra dimensions as a strategy for producing a unified field theory...
However interesting this view made art, what it did for politics was pure destruction. Paul Johnson connects relativism to the extreme nationalism of 20th century political movements in his generally persuasive view of Modern Times. The relationship he cites is sometimes elliptical. What one can say is that the destruction of absolutes--monarchies no less than Newtonian physics--created a vacuum, and in certain key places that vacuum was filled by maniacs and murderers...