* The de Broglie wavelength of a baseball thrown at 90 mph would be about 10–34 meters, incredibly smaller than the size of an atom or even a proton, so infinitessimal as to be unobservable.
* In 1995, Bose-Einstein condensation was finally achieved experimentally by Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Carl E. Wieman, who were awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize for this work.
* From his 1905 special relativity paper: “It is well known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics—as usually understood now—when applied to moving bodies leads to asymmetries that do not seem inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the electrodynamic interaction between a magnet and a conductor.” From the 1905 light quanta paper: “A profound formal difference exists between the theories that physicists have formed about gases and other ponderable bodies, and Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic processes in so-called empty space.”
* “To be is to be perceived,” meaning that it makes no sense to say that unperceived things—most famously Berkeley’s example of trees in a forest “and no body by to perceive them”—actually exist (George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, section 23).
* As Eddington showed, the cosmological term probably would not have worked even if the universe had turned out to be static. Because it required such a delicate balance, any small disturbance would have caused a runaway expansion or contraction of the universe.
* The pacifists assumed that no other explanation was needed, but some contemporary accounts somehow thought the buttons referred to 2 percent beer.
* There are two related concepts that Einstein uses.Separability means that different particles or systems that occupy different regions in space have an independent reality; locality means that an action involving one of these particles or systems cannot influence a particle or system in another part of space unless something travels the distance between them, a process limited by the speed of light.
* An aneurysm is the ballooning or dilation of a blood vessel, as if it were blistering. The abdominal aorta is one of the large arteries from the heart, in the region between the diaphragm and the abdomen.
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Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set Page 225
