Stephen Sekula (steve@chirp.cooleysekula.net)'s status on Monday, 21-Jul-2014 08:20:56 UTC
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Introductory talk at SUSY 2014 from head of Physics and Astronomy. Made a great point. Osborne Reynolds (1868-1905), father of fluid mechanics and creator of the "Reynolds Number," wrote in 1903 a 250-page mechanical theory of the universe where he explained the Aether as being composed of infinitesimal grains; his was a totally mechanical explanation of the cosmos, using the ideas and data of his day. Just 2 years later, in 1905, his ideas were destroyed by a single paper from a young man named Albert Einstein (his more elegantly and simply explained many strange observations merely by rethinking space and time). He, like his ideas, died in 1905. This is a good story, one we are asked to keep in mind at the SUSY conference.