Word: working
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reason general relativity broke down at the Big Bang was that it was not compatible with quantum theory, the other great conceptual revolution of the early 20th century. The first step toward quantum theory came in 1900, when Max Planck, working in Berlin, discovered that the radiation from a body that was glowing red hot could be explained if light came only in packets of a certain size, called quanta. It was as if radiation were packaged like sugar; you cannot buy an arbitrary amount of loose sugar in a supermarket but can only buy it in 1-lb. bags...
Einstein continued to work on the quantum idea into the 1920s but was deeply disturbed by the work of Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen, Paul Dirac in Cambridge and Erwin Schrodinger in Zurich, who developed a new picture of reality called quantum mechanics. No longer did tiny particles have a definite position and speed. On the contrary, the more accurately you determined the particle's position, the less accurately you could determine its speed, and vice versa...
Which shapes represent the fundamental structures in our universe? On this point, string theorists are currently clueless. For the world conjured into existence by M theory is so exotic that scientists are being forced to work not just at the frontier of physics but at the frontier of mathematics as well. Indeed, it may be that they lack some absolutely essential tool and will have to develop it, just as Isaac Newton was pushed by his investigations of the laws of motion to develop the calculus. As if that weren't hard enough, there is yet another major impediment...
...read Einstein's essays in Out of My Later Years is to see that he held none of the artistic or political ideas that were extrapolated from his work. Whatever revisions he made of Newton, he continued to side with his predecessor on the issue of causality. He abhorred chaos and revolution for its own sake. He was devoted to constancy as much as to relativity, and to the illogical and the senses. In the end, his most useful gift may be not that he pulled the world apart but that once that was done, he strove...
Massive public works projects put millions to work building schools, roads, libraries, hospitals; repairing bridges; digging conservation trails; painting murals in public buildings. The Securities and Exchange Commission regulated a stock market that had been run as an insiders' game. Federal funds protected home mortgages so that property owners could keep their homes; legislation guaranteed labor's right to organize and established minimum wages and maximum hours. A sweeping Social Security system provided a measure of security and dignity to the elderly...