Word: quarks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Heels whether this madness is a desirable condition. Di rector Joan Micklin Silver lets the action and Heard's characterization veer close to the actual, unfunny sort of in sanity. Once or twice before the happy ending, it seems that something gruesome may be in the air. The quark, or question mark, involves this dark chanciness that finally proves to have foreshadowed nothing. It is intentional, of course, but a trifle heavyhanded; the viewer wants to laugh more loudly than the director permits...
...half cheers! Two and three quarters? Not enough, in these cheerless times. Let's say three cheers and a quark for Head over Heels, an eccentric little comedy about what zoologists call pair bonding. The trouble with the pair on view is that only half of it, an unsteady young man named Charles (John Heard), is bonded. The other half has gone back to her husband. She is Laura (Mary Beth Hurt), a pretty and appealing but not very confident young woman who regards herself as quite ordinary. To the love-sotted Charles she is Cleopatra, and that...
...carly-morning cigar that would make Red Auerbach choke. He's got an incongruous poster of fish species on one wall of his office, and Einstein up on another; a pair of cross country skis stand in a corner. Behind him rests a picture of the first observed "charmed quark"--a species he originally identified--at which he smiles affectionately. This is the odd couple that has made brilliant, complementary contributions to what Glashow calls the "glorious tapestry of modern physics," contributions of such moment as to win the elusive plaudits of the Stockholm conclave...
Although the Nobel Prize Committee specifically cited these contributions, the public has latched on to Glashow's more recent hypothesis--that of the "charmed quarks." A testimony to what the imaginative selection of scientific names can do ("quark" originally comes from Joyce's "Finnegan s Wake"), charmed quarks are the next thread in this complex tapestry of theories. But while ingenious, the discovery of charm has no bearing on the awarding of the Nobel Prize. "No," Glashow bellows if you imply otherwise, "the citation from Sweden expressly doesn't mention charm. This is something else altogether...
...harbors no tolerance. "It's not complicated at all once you've been working with it for a while. Its beauty is its incredible simplicity." He drops his feet back on the floor, stokes his cigar, and begins to rock, Albert Einstein staring down over one shoulder, his charmed quark hovering over the other...