Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time. The clocks of two people would agree if they were at rest with respect to each other but not if they were moving. This has...
Einstein's postulate that the laws of nature should appear the same to all freely moving observers was the foundation of the theory of relativity, so called because it implies that only relative motion is important. Its beauty and simplicity were convincing to many scientists and philosophers. But there remained...
This unease continued through the 1920s and '30s. When Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921, the citation was for important--but by Einstein's standards comparatively minor--work also carried out in 1905. There was no mention of relativity, which was considered too controversial. I still get two...
A very important consequence of relativity is the relation between mass and energy. Einstein's postulate that the speed of light should appear the same to everyone implied that nothing could be moving faster than light. What happens is that as energy is used to accelerate a particle or a...