Word: one
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rather than at the turn of the past century, would have overcome his deep distrust of quantum mechanics and enthusiastically embraced branes and sparticles and superstrings. And given his almost superhuman ability to transcend conventional thinking and visualize the world in unprecedented ways, he might have been the one to crack the ultimate theory. It may in the end take an Einstein to complete Einstein's unfinished intellectual symphony...
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...
...revision of the definition of a hero. Anti-intellectualism has been as integral a part of American culture as the drive for universal education, and the fact that both have existed concurrently may account for the low status of teachers. In America it is not enough to be smart; one must compensate for one's intelligence by also showing the canniness and real-world power of the cowboy and the pioneer. Einstein did this. He was the first modern intellectual superstar, and he won his stardom in the only way that Americans could accept--by dint of intuitive, not scholarly...
...changed the composition of university faculties (largely from patrician to Jewish), and who also changed the composition of government. Until F.D.R.'s New Deal, the country had never associated the contemplative life with governmental action. Now there was a Brain Trust; being an "egghead" was useful, admirable, even sexy. One saw that it was possible to outthink the enemy. Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt urging the making of a uranium bomb, and soon a coterie of can-do intellectuals convened at Los Alamos to become the new cowboys of war machinery. Presidents have relied on eggheads ever since: Einstein...
...literature, things were ready to fall apart on their own, so any excuse to do so--especially one as revered as a theoretical restructuring of the universe--was embraced. In 1919 relativity exploded upon science. In 1922 T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land had a similar effect on literature. Yet when Eliot wrote, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," people took up the fragments but ignored the shoring...