Word: quantum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Feynman, who died of cancer in 1990 at 72, really was smarter than just about anyone else. He was a physicist's ( physicist who saw more deeply into the workings of nature than anyone but Einstein and perhaps a handful of others. His greatest achievement was the theory of quantum electrodynamics, which described the behavior of subatomic particles, atoms, light, electricity and magnetism. He also made significant contributions to areas outside his own field, including astrophysics, solid- state physics and computer science -- a rare breadth of accomplishment in the rigidly specialized scientific world...
What made Feynman a magician, though, was not any one of these achievements by itself, but the way he went about them. One of the common-nonsensical premises of quantum physics is that particles can travel from one place to another without traversing the space in between, and Feynman's thought process seemed to go from problem to solution in just about the same way. He rarely studied what was already known about a problem before attacking it. He was more interested in getting the solution than in doing the problem according to the rules, and he often ended...
This focus on answers rather than methods first became evident when Feynman led the math team in high school in Far Rockaway, New York. As undergraduates at M.I.T., he and a friend, Theodore Welton, re-created for themselves much of the physics discovered in the quantum revolution that had taken place in Europe during the 1920s. And although he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for the theory of quantum electrodynamics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga, Feynman had an approach that was typically bizarre. Instead of using conventional calculations, he invented "Feynman diagrams," arrows and squiggles that mapped...
...staking seven-digit sums of leveraged cash on a future drop in the value of the lira and pound sterling. Amid Europe's ongoing currency flux, Soros could have easily come out a big loser. But when the pound tumbled, his risky triumph delighted investors in the Soros-run Quantum Fund and peeved officials in Western Europe's vulnerable central banks, who were forced to cough up billions to prop up slipping currencies. Perhaps the banks' anger was just; speculators can push a currency up or down as much as 15% an hour...
...Only a new seed can yield a new crop," said Hagelin, a quantum physicist with a 1981 Ph.D. from Harvard. He is the candidate of the recently formed Natural Law Party...