Word: resting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time. The clocks of two people would agree if they were at rest with respect to each other but not if they were moving. This has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including one in which an extremely accurate timepiece was flown around the world and then compared with one that had stayed in place. If you wanted to live longer, you could keep flying to the east so the speed of the plane added...
...theory of relativity, so called because it implies that only relative motion is important. Its beauty and simplicity were convincing to many scientists and philosophers. But there remained a lot of opposition. Einstein had overthrown two of the Absolutes (with a capital A) of 19th century science: Absolute Rest as represented by the ether, and Absolute or Universal Time that all clocks would measure. Did this imply, people asked, that there were no absolute moral standards, that everything was relative...
...Bern, but didn't begin to think seriously about the problem until he was at the German University in Prague in 1911. He realized that there is a close relationship between acceleration and a gravitational field. Someone in a closed box cannot tell whether he is sitting at rest in the earth's gravitational field or being accelerated by a rocket in free space. (This being before the age of Star Trek, Einstein thought of people in elevators rather than spaceships. But you cannot accelerate or fall freely very far in an elevator before disaster strikes...
...accept that the universe was at its heart a cosmic crapshoot, so that today his papers on unified field theory seem hopelessly archaic. But the puzzle they tried to solve is utterly fundamental. In simply recognizing the problem, Einstein was so daringly far-sighted that only now has the rest of physics begun to catch up. A new generation of physicists has at last taken on the challenge of creating a complete theory--one capable of explaining, in Einstein's words, "every element of the physical reality." And judging from the progress they have made, the next century could usher...
...film may confuse those unfamiliar with Chinese history, but never mind. Just pay heed to the glorious moviemaking. There is one scene that haunts the heart: an ethereally beautiful blind girl (Xun Zhou) kills herself after the assassin has eradicated the rest of her family. Few directors can create such indelible imagery; Chen does it in nearly every frame...