Word: familiar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...took a successful Carnegie Hall show from early in Kaufman's career and recast it as his last hurrah before succumbing to cancer. Several girlfriends were combined into a composite character, played by Courtney Love, and a few other liberties were taken as well. But Kaufman's life remains familiar to those who best know it. "Facts, schmacts, they made him honest," says Bill Zehme, who spent six years researching Kaufman for his comprehensive new book Lost in the Funhouse (Delacorte; 368 pages; $25.95). "Scott and Larry did impressive research, learned exactly how Andy's life really happened, then threw...
...embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Albert Einstein's shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound--the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed...
...return to Zurich in 1912 Einstein had a brainstorm. He realized that the equivalence of gravity and acceleration could work if there was some give-and-take in the geometry of reality. What if space-time--an entity Einstein invented to incorporate the three familiar dimensions of space with a fourth dimension, time--was curved, and not flat, as had been assumed? His idea was that mass and energy would warp space-time in some manner yet to be determined. Objects like apples or planets would try to move in straight lines through space-time, but their paths would appear...
Nature rarely bestows gifts on scientists, however, without exacting a price, and the price, in this case, takes the form of additional complications. Among other things, string theory requires the existence of up to seven dimensions in addition to the by now familiar four (height, width, length and time). It also requires the existence of an entirely new class of subatomic particles, known as supersymmetric particles, or "sparticles." Moreover, there isn't just one string theory but five. Although scientists could rule out none of them, it seemed impossible that all of them could be right...
...came Giotto. He was an artisan like countless others of the age, though he possessed something his predecessors and contemporaries did not: an inner eye that could see how human figures could be brought to life on a wall. He replaced golden backdrops with the hills, meadows and houses familiar to 14th century Italians. In those earthly settings he placed three-dimensional Christs and Virgins, saints and sinners, painted as ordinary humans invested with natural emotions. His sweetly weary Madonna locks eyes with the observer as she swaddles a baby-size Jesus...