Word: travelitis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Einstein was one person who made each of our short lists. It was, above all, a century that would be remembered for advances in science and technology. Einstein stood out as its greatest scientific genius, and his work touched the most important fields of technology: nuclear weapons, television, space travel, lasers and semiconductors...
...Heisenberg, Bohr, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, even the ones he disagreed with--who built upon his work to decipher and harness the forces of the cosmos. As James Gleick wrote earlier this year in the TIME 100 series, "The scientific touchstones of our age--the Bomb, space travel, electronics--all bear his fingerprints." Or, to quote a TIME cover story from 1946 (produced by Whittaker Chambers): "Among 20th-Century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intellect, intuition and imagination which are rarely combined in one mind, but which, when they do occur together...
Even more central to this globalization were the electronic technologies that revolutionized the distribution of information, ideas and entertainment. Five centuries ago, Gutenberg's advances in printing helped lead to the Reformation (by permitting people to own their own Bibles and religious tracts), the Renaissance (by permitting ideas to travel from village to village) and the rise of individual liberty (by allowing ordinary folks direct access to information). Likewise, the 20th century was transformed by a string of inventions that, building on the telegraph and telephone of the 19th century, led to a new information...
...based, like much of Einstein's work, on a thought experiment: if you could travel at the speed of light, what would a light wave look like? If you were in a train that neared the speed of light, would you perceive time and space differently...
Soon, however, discrepancies with the idea of an all-pervading ether began to appear. You would expect light to travel at a fixed speed through the ether. So if you were traveling in the same direction as the light, you would expect that its speed would appear to be lower, and if you were traveling in the opposite direction to the light, that its speed would appear to be higher. Yet a series of experiments failed to find any evidence for differences in speed due to motion through the ether...