Word: amounting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Slow in learning to talk as a child, expelled by one headmaster and proclaimed by another unlikely to amount to anything, Einstein has become the patron saint of distracted schoolkids. But even at age five, he later recalled, he was puzzling over a toy compass and the mysteries of nature's forces...
...moving faster than light. What happens is that as energy is used to accelerate a particle or a spaceship, the object's mass increases, making it harder to accelerate any more. To accelerate the particle to the speed of light is impossible because it would take an infinite amount of energy. The equivalence of mass and energy is summed up in Einstein's famous equation E=mc2, probably the only physics equation to have recognition on the street...
Among the consequences of this law is that if the nucleus of a uranium atom fissions (splits) into two nuclei with slightly less total mass, a tremendous amount of energy is released. In 1939, with World War II looming, a group of scientists who realized the implications of this persuaded Einstein to overcome his pacifist scruples and write a letter to President Roosevelt urging the U.S. to start a program of nuclear research. This led to the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb that exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. Some people blame the atom bomb on Einstein because he discovered...
...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. In one of his groundbreaking papers written in 1905, when he was still at the patent office, Einstein showed that Planck's quantum hypothesis could explain what is called the photoelectric effect, the way certain metals give...
...cost. "How much happier a world it would be if one did not have to mount crusades against racism, segregation, a Holocaust, the extermination of 'inferior peoples,'" notes presidential historian Robert Dallek. "We don't need evil. We'd do fine without Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. Think of the amount of money and energy used in World War II--if only they could have been used in constructive ways. Good doesn't need evil. We'd be just as well...