Solar eclipse in 1919

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pages: 412 words: 122,952

Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, Copley Medal, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Occam's razor, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, Solar eclipse in 1919, William of Occam

World War I had kept Einstein's work from being widely circulated outside Germany, and when astronomers did hear of it, they weren't quite sure what to make of its unconventional and perplexing view of gravity. George Hale, like many astronomers at the time who were trained to observe rather than to tinker with mathematical equations, said he feared “it will always remain beyond my grasp.” All of that changed, though, once the findings of a British solar-eclipse expedition in 1919 transformed the name of Einstein, the former Swiss patent clerk, into a synonym for genius. At the time Einstein was working on general relativity, he had early on suggested a specific test that astronomers could perform to confirm his predicted curvatures in space-time: Photograph a field of stars at night, then for comparison photograph those same stars when they pass near the Sun's limb during a solar eclipse.

But a few years later, once his final theory was in place, Einstein doubled his predicted bending. The extra contribution, Einstein figured out, occurs due to the Sun's enormous mass warping space-time. He calculated that a stellar ray just grazing the Sun would get deflected by 1.7 arcseconds (a thousandth the width of the Moon). Three solar-eclipse expeditions were launched prior to 1919 to detect this light bending but were unsuccessful due to either bad weather or the ongoing war. The results of a fourth effort, an American endeavor led by Lick astronomers W. W. Campbell and Heber Curtis, were plagued by data comparison problems and so were never published.


pages: 157 words: 47,161

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Solar eclipse in 1919, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

He also realized that according to his theories light should be deflected by the sun. Einstein realized that the sun’s gravity would be powerful enough to bend the starlight of nearby stars. Since these stars could only be seen during a solar eclipse, Einstein proposed that an expedition be sent to witness the solar eclipse of 1919 to test his theory. (Astronomers would have to take two pictures of the night sky, one where the sun was absent and another during a solar eclipse. By comparing these two photographs, the position of the stars during the eclipse would have to move due to the sun’s gravity.) He was certain his theory would be shown to be correct.


pages: 203 words: 63,257

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Solar eclipse in 1919, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

The consequences are so bizarre that Bohr is reported to have said, “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” Remarkably, during this period of major upheaval in physics, theory and experiment kept pace with each other. Sometimes experiments provided dramatic confirmation of a theoretical prediction, as when astronomers observed during a solar eclipse in 1919 that the Sun’s gravity could bend the light from a distant star, just as Einstein’s general theory of relativity had anticipated. On other occasions, the application of a new theory led to a satisfactory explanation of experimental data. For example, Bohr used the concept of quantized energy to account for the spectral lines produced by hydrogen atoms absorbing light: he suggested that the lines resulted from electrons jumping between fixed orbits around the atomic nucleus.


pages: 366 words: 76,476

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Solar eclipse in 1919, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, two and twenty

Phish, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 photobombing photographs, 5.1, 7.1, 9.1, 14.1, 14.2, bm1.1 captions of, 3.1, 5.1 on OkCupid, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 14.1, nts.1 scrambled, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 phrenologists Pinterest, 7.1, 7.2, nts.1 Pitbull Pixar, 4.1, nts.1 pixels pizza, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, nts.1 planets, 10.1, nts.1 poetry, itr.1, 3.1, 11.1 polio vaccine politics, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 11.1 gridlock in, 9.1, 14.1 liberal vs. conservative, 6.1, 9.1, 9.2 party, 5.1, 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 14.1, nts.1 racism and Twitter use and popular culture, 3.1, 11.1 pornography gay, 11.1, 12.1, nts.1, nts.2 women-with-women Potomac River, 3.1, 3.2 PowerPoint presentations, 2.1, 14.1 “pratfall effect,” 2.1, nts.1 pravastatin Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, US psychology, 6.1, 10.1 neuro- social, 2.1, 7.1 punk rock puns, 3.1, 6.1 Quantcast, 6.1, nts.1 Quantified Self movement “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” (Michel and Aiden), n race, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2 attractiveness and, 6.1, 6.2 four largest groupings by Internet use and, itr.1, 6.1, 6.2 jokes about, 8.1n, 8.2, 9.1 quantitative analysis of, 6.1, nts.1 rhetoric about tokenism and racism, itr.1, 1.1, 5.1, 8.1, 9.1, 11.1 data on, itr.1, 6.1, nts.1 dating and, 6.1, 6.2 expression of, itr.1, 6.1, 8.1, 9.1, nts.1 Obama on pervasiveness of, 6.1, 8.1 politics and stereotypes of, 8.1, 10.1 radio CB, 9.1, nts.1 ratings compatibility, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 congressional, itr.1, itr.2 of men and women, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, itr.5, 1.1 pizza, itr.1, itr.2 Reagan, Ronald Reddit, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, 2.1, 12.1, 13.1, 14.1n, nts.1, nts.2 community and subreddit pages on, 2.1n, 12.1 relationships assimilated bonds of, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 breakup of, 1.1, 4.1 common interests in connectors in, 4.1, 4.2 of couples, 1.1, 4.1, 5.1, bm2.1 courtship, 1.1, 4.1 evaluation of family leading separate lives in, 4.1, 4.2 progression of “real life,” romantic, 1.1, 2.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, nts.1 stability in, itr.1, 4.1 see also dating; friends; marriage Republican National Convention of 2008 Republican Party, 5.1, 8.1, 13.1, 14.1, nts.1 Richter scale, 7.1, 12.1, nts.1 Rieger, Gerulf, 11.1, nts.1 Romans, ancient Romney, Mitt, Twitter followers of, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1 Rorschach tests Rove, Karl Russia, 9.1n, bm1.1 Ruthstrom, Ellyn, 11.1, nts.1 Sacco, Justine, 9.1, 9.2, 12.1, 13.1, nts.1 Salesforce.com, 13.1, 13.2, nts.1 Salk, Jonas Samsung Sapolsky, Robert, 7.1, nts.1 SAT science, itr.1, 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 6.1, 9.1 computer, 4.1, 13.1, 14.1 data, itr.1, itr.2, 2.1, 8.1n, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 14.1, 14.2, bm1.1, bm2.1, bm2.2 genetic network analysis political social, itr.1, itr.2, 5.1, 6.1, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1, bm2.1 Scientific American, 14.1, 14.2, nts.1, nts.2 Scruff, n Seacrest, Ryan seismology, 7.1, 12.1 selfies September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks sex, itr.1, 1.1, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1, 11.1 attractiveness and, itr.1, 1.1, 2.1, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, bm2.1 casual, 5.1, 11.1 regret and, itr.1, nts.1 threesome see also bisexuality; homosexuality; lesbianism; lust Shakespeare, William Sharpton, Al Shazam Shiftgig, 7.1, 7.2, nts.1 showers, 12.1, 12.2 Silver, Nate, 11.1, 11.2, 14.1, nts.1 Simmons, Gene “six degrees of separation” theory Slackers (film) Slate, itr.1n, 3.1, 13.1, nts.1 smartphones, itr.1, 12.1, 12.2 smell, sense of, 2.1, nts.1 Snapchat Snowden, Edward, 14.1, 14.2 social desirability bias social graphs, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 social media, 4.1, 6.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1, nts.1 unrest and protest fanned on social physics solar eclipse of 1919 Sorell, C. Joseph, 10.1n, nts.1 Sparks, Nicholas speech hate, 8.1, 9.1 partisan Spielberg, Steven sports, 6.1, 8.1, 10.1, 12.1 Stanford-Binet test states’ rights statistics, itr.1, 6.1, 6.2, 10.1, 10.2 Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth, 8.1n, 8.2, 11.1, 11.2, bm2.1, nts.1, nts.2, nts.3 stock market predictions Street Fighter II string theory Strunk, William Suler, John Supreme Court, US, 8.1, 13.1 symmetric beta distribution Taboo (game) talking points Target, 13.1, nts.1 tattoos, 2.1, 2.2 taxation, 8.1, 14.1, 14.2 Tea Party, 8.1, 9.1 technology, itr.1, itr.2, 4.1, 5.1, 9.1, 12.1, 13.1, 14.1 cultural effect of, 3.1, 3.2, 9.1 harnessing of telephones, itr.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 4.2, 9.1 television, 6.1, 6.2, 14.1n Tennyson, Alfred, Lord terrorism Texas, 8.1, 12.1, 12.2 text messages, 3.1, 3.2, 14.1 average length of, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 copy-and-paste vs. from-scratch keystrokes used on, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 response rates to, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 revision of time spent on, 3.1, 3.2 Thoreau, Henry David, 11.1, nts.1 thought, 1.1, 8.1, 8.2 time, 3.1, 3.2, 8.1 passage of, 3.1, 3.2 spent on messages, 3.1, 3.2 Tinder, itr.1, 7.1 tribes, 3.1, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, nts.1 Trump, Donald Tufte, Edward R., bm1.1, nts.1 Tumblr, itr.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2, nts.1, nts.2 Clients from Hell posts on Twitter, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, itr.5, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 8.1, 9.1, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, nts.1 average word length on black users of, 13.1, nts.1 common hashtags on, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 followers on, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 #HasJustineLandedYet topic on, 9.1, 9.2, nts.1 language style and vocabulary on, 3.1, 13.1, nts.1 messaging patterns of subgroups on most common words on, 3.1, 10.1, 10.2 140-character limit on, 3.1, 3.2 TeamFollowBack on, 13.1, 13.2 Trending Topics list on tweets and retweets on, itr.1, itr.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 6.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, nts.1 TwitterWind ugliness, 1.1, 2.1, 6.1, 8.1 race and social costs of Ulysses (Joyce) uniform resource locators (URLs), 2.1, 3.1n Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 12.1, nts.1 United Kingdom (UK), 6.1, 12.1, 13.1, 14.1, nts.1 United States, 6.1, 8.1, 8.2, 12.1 Internet usage in moving in, 12.1, nts.1 national security apparatus of, itr.1, 14.1 Twitter use in universal product code (UPC) Utsunomiya variance concept verbs, 3.1, 3.2 Viet-Cong, 8.1, nts.1 Vietnam Memorial, bm1.1, nts.1 Vietnam War, 8.1, bm1.1, nts.1 visual perception, itr.1n, 6.1 Wall Street Journal, 7.1, nts.1 Walmart, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, nts.1 Warden, Pete Washington, DC, “Million” marches on, 14.1, nts.1 Washington Post, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, nts.1 Waters, John, 2.1, 2.2, nts.1 Watson, James wealth, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2n, 7.3, 11.1, 13.1 One Percent of websites, itr.1, 4.1, 6.1, 12.1, 12.2 company dating, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 7.1, 12.1 job, itr.1, 7.1, 7.2 person-to-person interaction on, itr.1, itr.2, 2.1, 5.1, 6.1 ratings on, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, itr.5, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 2.1, 2.2, 6.1 social, itr.1, 4.1, 6.1 see also specific websites WEIRD research, itr.1, 7.1n, nts.1 Wendy’s, 13.1, nts.1 “What Is Beautiful Is Good,” 7.1, nts.1 WhatsApp WhoBeefed81 Who Owns the Future?


pages: 287 words: 87,204

Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, Brownian motion, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Solar eclipse in 1919, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, trade route, upwardly mobile

He became fascinated by the cosmological ideas of Arthur Eddington (1882–1944), a British Grand Old Man whose illustrious career had included explaining the general theory of relativity to the English-speaking world and testing Einstein’s theory by making observations of the stars during a solar eclipse in 1919. He was a great popularizer of science, and intrigued by the puzzle of how to reconcile the general theory with quantum mechanics. But by the 1930s he was in his scientific dotage. He had recently come up with a complicated hypothesis claiming to link cosmology with quantum theory and containing as a crucial ingredient (in what he called the “fundamental relation”) a calculation of the number of particles in the Universe, N.


pages: 326 words: 97,089

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Solar eclipse in 1919, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

He wanted to create a telescope that would surpass all others, one with a magnifying lens nearly a million and a half kilometers in diameter. Drake had found a way to transform the Sun itself into the ultimate telescope. A consequence of the Sun’s immense mass is that it acts as a star-size “gravitational lens,” bending and amplifying light that grazes its surface. This effect, first measured during a solar eclipse in 1919 by the astronomer Arthur Eddington, was one of the key pieces of evidence that validated Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Simple math and physics, judiciously applied, show that our star bends light into a narrow beam aligned with the center of the Sun and the center of any far-distant light source.


pages: 339 words: 112,979

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Solar eclipse in 1919, Steven Pinker, Zipf's Law

Einstein himself openly made aesthetic judgements in science, and perhaps went too far. 'The most beautiful thing we can experience,' he said, 'is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.' Sir Arthur Eddington, whose own scientific writings were noted for poetic flair, used the solar eclipse of 1919 to test General Relativity and returned from Principe Island to announce, in Banesh Hoffmann's phrase, that Germany was host to the greatest scientist of the age. I read those words with a catch in the throat, but Einstein himself took the triumph in his stride. Any other result and he would have been 'sorry for the dear Lord.


pages: 407 words: 116,726

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Astronomia nova, Bernie Sanders, clockwork universe, complexity theory, cosmological principle, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, fudge factor, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Laplace demon, lone genius, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Socratic dialogue, Solar eclipse in 1919, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, the scientific method

To this day, the nonlinear equations of general relativity conceal many secrets. Einstein was able to excavate some of them through his mathematical skill and doggedness. He predicted, for example, that starlight would bend as it passed around the sun on its way to our planet, a prediction that was confirmed during a solar eclipse in 1919 and that made Einstein an international sensation, front-page news in the New York Times. The theory also predicted that gravity could have a strange effect on time: The passage of time could speed up or slow down as an object moves through a gravitational field. Bizarre as this sounds, it really does occur.


pages: 1,396 words: 245,647

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, gravity well, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Murray Gell-Mann, period drama, Richard Feynman, Simon Singh, Solar eclipse in 1919, Stephen Hawking, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia

Robert 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 personality 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 dislike of Cambridge life 1 clinical depression 1, 2 tries to poison Blackett 1 works with PD 1 friendship with PD 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 at Born’s Department of Theoretical Physics 1 poetry 1 Ph.D. on the quantum mechanics of molecules 1, 2 and the rise of anti-Semitism 1 disappointed with PD’s work in Göttingen 1 at University of California at Berkeley 1, 2 and PD’s hole theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on the Heisenberg-Pauli theory 1 and Anderson’s positive electron 1 quantum electrodynamics 1 Scientific Director of the Manhattan Project 1, 2, 3, 4 celebrated as a hero in the USA 1 director of the Institute for Advanced Study 1 former Communist sympathies 1 adviser on nuclear policy 1 US withdraws his security clearance 1 appearance 1 retirement and death 1 and black holes 1 Orpington, south-east London 1 Orwell, George 1, 2, 3 Coming Up for Air 1 The Lion and the Unicorn 1 Oseen, Carl 1 Ottawa 1 Oxford 1 Pais, Abraham 1, 2n24 Subtle is the Lord 1n20 Palais de la Découverte, La, Paris 1, 2 pantheism 1 Papal Academy 1, 2, 3 parity violation 1, 2 particle accelerators 1, 2 particle physics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Pauli, Wolfgang 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14n33 an analytical conservative analyst 1 exclusion principle 1, 2 personality 1 and electron spin 1 PD’s harshest critic 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Second Principle 1 praises PD’s textbook 1 and PD’s hole theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 co-presents seminar with PD at Princeton 1 appearance 1 the neutrino 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 problems in his personal life 1 second marriage 1 quarrels with Heisenberg 1 Nobel Prize 1 death 1, 2 Pavlov, Ivan 1 ‘Peanuts’ 1 Pearl Harbor, bombing of 1 Peierls, Genia 1 Peierls, Rudolf 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14n12, 15n10 Penrose, Roger 1 Peterhouse College, Cambridge 1 Phillips, Leslie Roy 1, 2n4, 3n26, 4n31 philosophy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Phoney War 1, 2 photography, amateur 1 photons 1 and Einstein 1 and Langer 1 light consisting of 1, 2, 3n20 scattering by a single electron 1 stimulated emission process and the laser 1 Picasso, Pablo 1, 2 Pickering, Arthur 1, 2, 3 Pincher, Chapman 1, 2n44 Pippard, Brian 1 Planck, Max quantum hypothesis 1, 2, 3 blackbody radiation spectrum 1, 2 Planck’s constant 1, 2 Plato 1 Podolsky, Boris 1, 2, 3n25 Poisson bracket 1, 2, 3n40 Poland Hitler’s invasion of 1 collapse of 1 Manci’s view of Poles 1 Polkinghorne, John 1, 2 Poncelet, Jean-Victor 1 Portishead, Bristol 1, 2, 3 Portland Street Chapel, Bristol 1 position and momentum symbols 1, 2 positive energy states 1 positivism 1, 2 positron emission tomography (PET) 1, 2 positrons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12n34 see also anti-electrons Pottier family 1n16 Pravda 1, 2 ‘primitive atom’ theory 1, 2 Princeton 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Princeton University 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8n50 bicentennial celebrations 1 Fine Hall (later Jones Hall) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Fuld Hall 1, 2 Graduate College 1 Proceedings of the Royal Society 1 projective geometry 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7n5 protons atomic nuclei 1 negative 1 strongly interacting 1 Pryce, Gritli (née Born) 1 Pryce, Maurice 1, 2, 3 pulsars 1 Punch magazine 1 Pythagoras’s theorem 1 quanta 1 energy 1, 2 Schrödinger’s wave theory 1 see also photons quantum chromodynamics 1 quantum electrodynamics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 quantum field theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 see also quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics quantum jumps 1, 2n24 quantum mechanics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 named by Born 1 birthplace of 1 building of the complete theory 1 first prediction of 1 mathematical symbols in 1, 2 central role of probability 1 relationship with classical mechanics 1, 2 relativistic 1 and miniaturisation 1 quantum numbers 1, 2 quantum theory discovered by Planck 1 Einstein lays its foundations 1 laws of 1 PD introduces the mathematics of creation and annihilation 1 the universe as fundamentally granular 1 quarks 1, 2, 3, 4 quaternions 1, 2, 3 Queen Mary (liner) 1 Rabi, Isidor 1 radiation electromagnetic 1, 2, 3 gravitational 1 radio 1, 2, 3 radioactive decay 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Rain Man (film) 1 Ramond, Pierre 1, 2, 3n1 Reagan, Ronald 1 Redlands Girls’ School, Bristol 1 reductionism 1 relativity 1, 2, 3, 4 as PD’s passion 1, 2 Broad’s teaching of 1 Einstein’s general theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 n32, 27n35 Einstein’s special theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20n10 Hassé speaks on the subject at Cambridge 1 Rembrandt van Rijn 1 renormalisation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10n29 Retherford, Robert 1 Reynolds’s Illustrated News 1 Richards, Sir Gordon 1 Riemann, Bernhard 1, 2 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 1 Robertson, Andrew 1 Robertson, David 1, 2, 3, 4 Robertson, Howard 1 Robertson, Malcolm 1 Robeson, Paul 1 Roentgen Institute, Leningrad 1 Rolls-Royce 1, 2n1 Röntgen, Wilhelm 1 Roosevelt, Eleanor 1 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 1, 2, 3, 4 Roselawn cemetery, Tallahassee 1 Rosen, Nathan 1 Rosenfeld, Léon 1 Rothschild, Victor, Lord 1n51 ‘Roundy’ (Joseph Coughlin) 1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1, 2 Royal Air Force 1, 2, 3 Royal Astronomical Society, Burlington House, London 1n16 Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 82, 1, 2 Royal Navy 1, 2 Royal Society 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 PD elected a Fellow 1 funds the Mond Laboratory 1 Baker Medal 1 and Heisenberg 1, 2n33 and Schrödinger 1 Royal Society of Scotland 1 Rugby, Warwickshire 1, 2 Russell, Bertrand 1 ‘Zahatopolk’ 1n6 Rutherford, Ernest, Baron Rutherford of Nelson 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and Eddington 1, 2 personality 1, 2, 3, 4 appearance 1 discovery of the atomic nucleus 1, 2 proposes the neutron 1, 2 director of the Cavendish Laboratory 1 Kapitza’s nickname for him (‘the Crocodile’) 1 and Kapitza’s support of Communism 1 and Bohr 1, 2 relationship with Kapitza 1, 2 loathes Bernal 1, 2 ennobled 1 death of his daughter 1 and Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron 1 and the Cockcroft-Walton splitting of the atom 1 leadership of Cambridge experimental physicists 1 Blackett’s anger at his despotic style 1 bottom-up approach to physics 1 bas-relief in the Mond Laboratory 1 stays in Bohr’s mansion 1n47 and Kapitza’s detention 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and PD’s marriage 1 on Eddington 1 death 1 memorial service at Westminster Abbey 1, 2 St John’s College, Cambridge 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 PD unable to take up a place at (1921) 1, 2 PD wins two scholarships (1923) 1 PD arrives at 1 described 1, 2, 3 encourages PD to apply for a Fellowship 1 awards PD a special lectureship 1, 2n36 Tamm’s visit (1931) 1 Born’s honorary position 1 Combination Room 1, 2, 3, 4 Fellowship extended for life 1 Isenstein bust of PD 1 PD’s last visit to 1 first women undergraduates 1 nurturing environment for PD 1 PD apologises for absence at eightieth birthday celebrations 1n66 PD’s Nobel Medal and certificate returned 1n37 St Maurice, Switzerland 1, 2n16 Sakharov, Andrei 1 Salam, Abdus 1, 2, 3, 4 Salaman, Esther and Myer 1, 2, 3n24 scattering matrix 1, 2 Schnabel, Artur 1 Schönberg, Arnold 1, 2, 3n15 Schrödinger, Annemarie (Anny) 1, 2, 3 Schrödinger, Erwin 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7n8 his quantum theory 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 reputation as a polymath 1 wave mechanics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 visits the Bohr Institute 1 Nobel Prize for physics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 personality 1 a refugee in Oxford 1 affirms his loyalty to the Nazi regime 1, 2, 3 accepts Dublin post 1 Dublin conference (1942) 1 elected to the Royal Society 1 death 1 PD’s obituary 1, 2n56 Schrödinger’s equation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Schuster, Arthur 1 Schwarz, John 1 Schwinger, Julian 1 Science journal 1, 2 Science Museum, London 1, 2 Scientific American 1, 2n10 Scott lecture 1, 2 Second Physics Institute, Göttingen 1 Second World War Chamberlain declares war on Germany 1 Cambridge 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 blitzkrieg of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands 1 end of the war in Europe 1 Seiberg, Nathan 1 Sen, Colleen Taylor 1n35 Shakespeare, William 1, 2 Hamlet 1, 2, 3 Love’s Labour’s Lost 1 Richard II 1 Shankland, Robert 1 Shaw, George Bernard 1 Getting Married 1, 2 – Preface 1 The Irrational Knot 1 Shelter Island Conference, Long Island, New York (1947) 1 Shinyo Maru (steamer) 1 Sidgwick, Henry 1n53 Silver Lake, near Tallahassee 1 Simon, Sir Francis 1 Simpsons, The 1, 2n8 Sinatra, Frank 1, 2n48 Skye, Isle of 1 Slater, John 1, 2, 3n8 Sliger, Bernie 1 Snow, C. P. 1 The Search 1, 2n51 Social-Democratic Workers’ Party 1 Socialist Society 1 sociology 1 solar-eclipse experiments (1919) 1, 2, 3, 4 Solvay Conferences 1927 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 1930 1 1933 1 1961 1 Sommerfeld, Arnold: Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines 1 Sound of Music, The (film) 1 Soviet Academy of Sciences 1, 2, 3 Soviet Conference on Nuclear Physics (Leningrad, 1933) 1 Soviet Embassy, Washington 1 Soviet Union PD’s first visit 1, 2 PD’s second visit 1 and the British press 1, 2 the Soviet experiment 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 the Jazz Band 1, 2 PD falls foul of the censors 1 PD’s support for Soviet physics 1 PD attends Leningrad conference (1933) 1 PD unaware of the cost of the collectivisation programme 1 PD in Bolshevo 1, 2 Great Purge 1 trials in 1 Nazi invasion of 1 PD and colleagues refused visas by Churchill 1 Fuchs passes secrets to 1 early detonation of the Soviet nuclear weapon 1 Sputnik missions 1 space programme 1 Cuban crisis 1 space-time curved 1, 2, 3 and de Sitter 1 more than four dimensions of 1 special theory of relativity 1 unified 1 Spanish Civil War (1936 ) 1 Spender, Stephen Journals 1n38 World Within World 1 Spielberg, Steven 1 spinors 1 spintronics 1 Spinoza, Baruch 1 Sputnik missions 1 SS 1 Stalin, Joseph 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 rise to absolute power 1 industrialisation policy 1, 2 collective farming programme 1 interviewed in New Statesman 1 and the intelligentsia 1 attitude to science 1, 2 Cambridge students favour over Hitler 1 his government becomes more repressive 1 non-aggression pact with Hitler 1, 2 and Kapitza 1, 2 death 1 Khrushchev denounces 1 Stalingrad 1 Standard Model 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Stanford, Henry King 1, 2 Stanford University 1 Star Trek 1, 2, 3 n8 Start the Week (Radio 1 programme) 2 steady-state theory 1, 2 Stockholm, Sweden 1, 2, 3 Stockman, Gertrude 1 Stokes, Sir George 1 Stony Brook, New York 1n6 Stoppard, Tom: Arcadia 1 Strassman, Fritz 1 Strategic Defence (‘Star Wars’) Initiative 1 stress diagrams 1, 2n54 string theory 1, 2, 3, 4n27 strings 1, 2 strong interaction 1, 2, 3 subatomic particle accelerators 1 Sudarshan, George 1n31 Suez crisis (1956) 1 Sunday Dispatch 1 Svenska Dagbladet 1, 2 Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels 1 Swirles, Bertha 1n15 Switzerland, PD visits 1, 2 Szilárd, Leó 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ’t Hooft, Gerard 1 Tallahassee, Florida 1, 2, 3, 4 Tallahassee Democrat 1 Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, Florida 1, 2 Tamm, Igor 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 at Leiden 1 personality 1 politics 1 first Soviet theoretician to use quantum mechanics 1 friendship with PD 1 meets up with PD in Moscow 1 and PD’s hole theory 1, 2 on ‘brigade education’ 1 and the positron’s detection 1 in Bolshevo 1 climbing vacation in the USSR with PD 1, 2 secret project to build the hydrogen bomb 1 Nobel Prize 1 Tata Institute, Bombay 1, 2n30 technical drawing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5n40, 6n44 Teller, Edward 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9n12 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 1 Teszler, Betty (PD’s sister) see Dirac, Beatrice Teszler, Christine (PD’s niece) 1, 2n29 Teszler, Joe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6n34 Teszler, Roger (PD’s nephew) 1, 2, 3 Thatcher, Margaret, Baroness 1, 2, 3 theoretical physics 1, 2 Berlin as its global capital 1 PD introduces a new approach to 1 Weyl’s approach 1 Thomson, J.


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The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy

Ada Lovelace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dava Sobel, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, German hyperinflation, global village, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, music of the spheres, New Journalism, P = NP, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Simon Singh, Solar eclipse in 1919, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam, Wolfskehl Prize, Y2K

No one had contemplated the idea that three-dimensional space might also bend. We realise now that Gauss was working on too small a scale to observe any significant bending of space to counter the view of a Euclidean world. Arthur Eddington’s confirmation of the bending of light from stars during the solar eclipse of 1919 supported Gauss’s hunch. Gauss never went public with his ideas, perhaps because his new geometries seemed to be at variance with the task of mathematics, which was to represent physical reality. The friends he did mention his idea to, Gauss pledged to secrecy. The idea of these new geometries was eventually floated publicly in the 1830s by the Russian Nikolai Ivanovic Lobachevsky and the Hungarian János Bolyai.


pages: 442 words: 110,704

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus Du Sautoy

Albert Michelson, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, banking crisis, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Black Swan, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Georg Cantor, Hans Lippershey, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Solar eclipse in 1919, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, Turing test, wikimedia commons

It was a highly unexpected prediction of the theory, but one that could be tested: a perfect scenario for a scientific theory. Convincing evidence for this picture of a curved space-time was provided by the British astronomer Arthur Eddington’s observations of light from distant stars recorded during the solar eclipse of 1919. The theory predicted that the light from distant stars would be bent by the gravitational effect of the Sun. Eddington needed the eclipse to block out the glare of the Sun so that he could see the stars in the sky. The fact that the light did indeed seem to bend round objects of large mass confirmed that the shortest paths weren’t Euclidean straight lines but curved.


Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eyjafjallajökull, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Solar eclipse in 1919, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

* * * This phrase was first used by the British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington in the early twentieth century to describe this deceptively simple and yet profound quality of our universe: it always seems to run in a particular direction. Eddington was instrumental in bringing Einstein’s theory of relativity to the English-speaking world during the First World War, and also one of the first scientists to directly confirm the findings of relativity when he led an expedition to observe the total solar eclipse on 29 May 1919. In 1928 he published The Nature of the Physical World, in which he introduced two great ideas that have endured in popular scientific culture to this day. The first was the image of the infinite monkey theorem, which states that given an infinite amount of time, anything consistent with the laws of physics will happen: ‘If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum’.


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The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Solar eclipse in 1919, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

If matter cannot be destroyed, Then living mind can never die; If e’en creative when alloy’d, How sure is immortality!70 Intriguingly, the first stanza appears to anticipate Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1915), in which light is ‘bent’ by gravity; and then Eddington’s observations of a solar eclipse in 1919, when he recorded starlight actually being bent by the sun. But apparent anticipations of this kind can be deceptive in science, often hiding a more significant contemporary meaning. Here Davy was really expressing a more traditional belief: the sudden confidence that ‘eternal laws’ govern the universe in a benign and ordered way.


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The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Solar eclipse in 1919, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

In one passage, “the smart set” journeys to find “buried suns” in a distant place where “on blood-stained shingly beaches one may hear the tender murmur of the stars.” The section is called Eclipses, and it was written just as British astronomers traveled to Sobral in Brazil, and the island of Principe, West Africa, to observe a real-life solar eclipse predicted for May 29, 1919. Their mission was to measure the deflection of starlight during the eclipse, a problem that lead scientist Arthur Eddington described as “weighing light.” No wonder surrealist Breton was fascinated. Now it was the scientists’ turn to leave behind the comforts of common sense, and journey into territory that was strange beyond their wildest dreams.


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Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Solar eclipse in 1919, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

General relativity explained a precession in the orbit of the planet Mercury that had been left unaccounted for in Newtonian mechanics, and he did not doubt it would survive further tests as well. As he wrote his friend Besso, “I am fully satisfied, and I do not doubt any more the correctness of the whole system…. The sense of the thing is too evident.”41 The wider scientific community, however, awaited the verdict of experiment. There would be a total solar eclipse on May 29, 1919, at which time the sun would stand against the bright stars of the Hyades cluster. The English astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington led an expedition to a cocoa plantation on Principe Island off west Equatorial Africa to observe the eclipse and see whether the predicted curvature of space in the region of the sun would distort the apparent positions of the stars in the briefly darkened sky.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Solar eclipse in 1919, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

The same is true for many suspected experimental malfunctions: the supposed aberration is often temporary, and there is no way in retrospect to determine whether it happened or, if it did, to what degree. The facts of the matter are lost to history. Popper suggested a different way to deal with these cases: do the experiment a second time, more carefully. Again, scientists are readily observed following this advice—but again, it is not always feasible. Solar eclipses are rare enough; what made Eddington’s 1919 eclipse rarer still was the sun’s position, at the time of totality, in the center of a field of relatively bright stars. As Eddington pointed out when touting the experiment, this happy alignment “would not occur again for many years.” He might have wanted to go back for another round of stellar photography, but he could not—so he found other ways to press his case against the Brazilian astrographic and in favor of Einstein.


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Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Edmond Halley, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Louis Pasteur, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Solar eclipse in 1919

Instead of the Newtonian idea of gravity as an attractive force, he conceptualized gravity as geometry: a massive object warps the fabric of space-time around it. That means light, instead of traveling in a straight line, takes a curved path in its vicinity. Einstein’s equations predicted by just how much the light’s path would bend. The stunning confrmation came four years later. A total solar eclipse was to take place on May 29, 1919. Conveniently, it would occur in front of a rich cluster of stars known as the Hyades, offering an excellent opportunity to measure any defection of starlight by the Sun’s gravity. Less conveniently, the total eclipse could only be seen from the tropics. So the English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington mounted an expedition to the island of Principe, off the west coast of Africa, while another group set sail for Brazil.


The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Solar eclipse in 1919, the scientific method

He just needed to pack up the cutting-edge astronomical equipment of 1919 and get into the path of the eclipse. In 2017, many normally quiet corners of the United States found themselves overrun with astronomy enthusiasts as they crammed themselves, their cars, and their cameras into the path of the solar eclipse. Still, a traffic jam in Wyoming isn’t quite as rough as what Eddington’s 1919 trip entailed. More than two months before the May 29 eclipse, he sailed from England to Príncipe Island off the coast of western Africa, toting a huge telescope borrowed from an observatory in Oxford and a slew of fragile glass photographic plates. The equipment was set up and ready weeks ahead of time, and the team held its breath on the day of the eclipse as torrential rain and thick clouds blocked out the sky all morning.


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Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Solar eclipse in 1919, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game


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Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, NP-complete, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Solar eclipse in 1919, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game