Word: wheeler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sonnenberg dressed like an Edwardian, cultivated the rich and powerful, and lived in a style most of his clients envied. In his 37-room, antique-filled mansion on Manhattan's Gramercy Park, he held lavish soirées at which he flourished as raconteur and keeper of secrets, wheeler-dealer and patron of intellectuals. Sonnenberg once proclaimed: "I want my house and office to convey an impression of stability and to give myself a dimension, background and tradition that go back to the Nile...
...suggested tapping the energy of a mini-black hole in orbit around the planet. From a spacecraft orbiting at a safe distance, pellets would be fired at the hole. This would create so much heat that the energy could be converted into microwaves and beamed down to earth. Even Wheeler, who is now at the University of Texas, and his former student, Kip Thorne, once proposed construction of an entire civilization around a black hole (just outside the event horizon, of course...
Unlike Laplace's dark star, this Einsteinian black hole?the name was not coined by Physicist Wheeler until the 1960s?had far more finality. Since relativity forbids anything to move faster than light, an idea unknown in classic Newtonian physics, escape was impossible. All the energy in the world could not extract an object from a black hole...
...research fellow at Cambridge, he and a colleague, Roger Penrose, showed more convincingly than ever before that if Einsteinian general relativity is correct, gravitational collapse will result in "singularities" that are totally hidden inside black holes. But Hawking did not stop there. Following up the work of John Wheeler's student, Jacob Bekenstein, he pointed out that there are important mathematical analogies between the bizarre otherworld of black holes and the familiar physical rules of thermodynamics, notably the idea of entropy-which says, in effect, that the universe is running down like an unwinding clock...
...results. But no one has yet uncovered flaws in his elaborate mathematics. Indeed, many theorists believe that with this work Hawking may well have qualified for the Nobel Prize by taking the first step toward a goal that has long been a dream of physicists: the consummation of what Wheeler calls the "fiery marriage" between general relativity-the great theoretical system for studying the large-scale structure of the cosmos-and quantum mechanics-the mathematical tool for analyzing the diminutive world of the atomic nucleus...