Word: physicist
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...Felipe is no luxury resort. Few of the settlements have electricity. But refrigerators run on propane and computers on solar panels. Cell phones substitute for land lines. E-mail is offered through The Net, a computer service run by physicist Tony Colleraine, who retired early from defense contractor General Atomics and now hustles Mexican businesses to advertise on www.sanfelipe.com.mx...
...gone. There's a record of the light beam stored in the gas atoms, and when the physicists zap the gas with another burst of light, the first one reappears in its original form (how they tell them apart is a physicist thing). And thus is light made to stop at a traffic light and wait, before being sent...
Although the society is new, physicians and scholars have known about the condition for centuries. History, in fact, teems with brilliant synesthetes--including such luminaries as novelist Vladimir Nabokov, composer Franz Liszt and physicist Richard Feynman. Synesthesia enjoyed a certain spiritual currency in the late 19th century, especially among the European avant-garde. Many artists, most notably abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, were famed for their synesthetic pretensions. "I saw all my colors," wrote Kandinsky, recalling his experience of a Wagner opera. "Wild lines verging on the insane formed drawings before my very eyes...
Lane, who was trained as a physicist, says that Summers has a talent for explaining how the complex ideas of science can have real-world benefits. For example, Lane says Summers likes to explain how the idea of the square root of negative one, i--a so-called imaginary number--has had a tremendous effect on technology. i represents a point in the two-dimensional plane, and such two-dimensional numbers are used extensively in engineering and physics. Lane says Summers uses i as an example of how theoretical understanding can lead to practical benefits...
...India rubber. The trouble was that some sort of antigravity force--Einstein called it the "cosmological term"--was required to make the predictions of general relativity match what astronomers believed the actual universe looked like. And that extra term marred the mathematical elegance of his beloved equations. The great physicist was hugely relieved when the discovery of the expanding universe in the 1920s let him cross out what he declared was "my greatest blunder...