Word: physicists
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...world of technology has never been short of eccentrics and obsessives, of rich, brilliant oddballs with strange habits and stranger hobbies. But even in this crowd, Dean Kamen stands out. The 50-year-old son of a comic-book artist, he is a college dropout, a self-taught physicist and mechanical engineer with a handful of honorary doctorates, a multimillionaire who wears the same outfit for every occasion: blue jeans, a blue work shirt and a pair of Timberland boots. With the accent of his native Long Island, he speaks slowly, passionately--and endlessly. "If you ask Dean the time...
...world of technology has never been short of eccentrics and obsessives, of rich, brilliant oddballs with strange habits and stranger hobbies. But even in this crowd, Dean Kamen stands out. The 50-year-old son of a comic-book artist, he is a college dropout, a self-taught physicist and mechanical engineer with a handful of honorary doctorates, a multimillionaire who wears the same outfit for every occasion: blue jeans, a blue work shirt and a pair of Timberland boots. With the accent of his native Long Island, he speaks slowly, passionately--and endlessly. "If you ask Dean the time...
...Like the sports and entertainment worlds, the Internet is a winner-take-all marketplace where relatively few companies reap huge profits. There is a very low probability that a new site will attract significant traffic. And congestion, or "storms" that slow access to pages, can be predicted mathematically. A physicist and an expert in computational economics, Huberman explains his rules with models based on statistical mechanics--but uses straightforward language that makes them accessible...
...prospect of another difficult read might make readers wary of taking on the University of Cambridge physicist's latest work, The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam; 216 pages; $35). That would be a loss. Hawking takes on plenty of intimidating topics in Nutshell, including space-time geometry, quantum mechanics and the ominously titled M-theory. But he does it in a much more accessible way this time, using plenty of comprehensible analogies and no small amount of humor, often self-deprecating. Example: "Newton occupied the Lucasian chair at Cambridge that I now hold, though it wasn't electrically operated...
...illustrations by Philip Dunn that explain the thornier concepts better than words ever could. There are plenty of photos too, of everything from Einstein on a bicycle to Hawking's grandson. And every few pages, the author throws in an informative block of text--a miniprofile of an important physicist, a digression on the idea of linking our brains directly to computers, a minitutorial on taking the temperature of a black hole...