Word: physicists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...most unusual communication was with the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time (almost 9 million copies sold), whose battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) did not keep him from visiting Caltech in March. Charles e-mailed Hawking's assistant, and after making two small editing changes requested by Hawking, received a FedEx package from California the next day. Inside was a piece of paper bearing Hawking's freshly made right thumbprint...
Mortality is a familiar DMB theme, and it surfaces on Everyday. When Matthews was 10, his physicist father John died of cancer; in 1994, Matthews' elder sister Anne was murdered. Says Matthews: "It had an effect on my outlook. Statements like, 'They're in a better place'--all that stuff is just junk food. Her death and the death of my father made me stand up and pay attention. It makes you not want to forget--not want to forget to live...
...hire an experimental physicist, you might need four or five thousand square feet," he said at University Hall after a faculty meeting...