In September 1930, Germany held its first national elections since the Great Crash of 1929, and the National Socialists won a stunning tally: 6,400,000 votes—10 times their total just two years before—and 107 seats. They were now the second largest party in the Reichstag. The word “Nazi” no longer evoked images of the madhouse, as one commentator wrote. Suddenly the party was almost respectable.
From The Boston Globe
IT BEGAN with a broken leg. On a long journey through India, a Nevada resident in her 70s fractured her femur. Complications took her to several Indian hospitals. Eventually, she returned to the United States, but her problems followed her home. In August of last year, she had to be hospitalized once again. In Reno, she presented with systemic inflammatory response syndrome — a condition that can produce a racing heart, frantic breathing, and other symptoms. The syndrome often marks a powerful immune response to an infection. So her doctors looked for a microbe that might have provoked her increasingly devastating response…
From The Boston Globe
TWO MEN came to Zurich in the spring of 1913, Max Planck and Walther Nernst, both future Nobel laureates. Their mission: to persuade Switzerland’s best-regarded young physicist, Albert Einstein, to join them in Berlin. As the three of them talked, Planck asked Einstein what he was working on at the moment. Einstein replied that he was wrestling with a new theory of gravity that would, if he could work it all out, supplant Isaac Newton’s universal law of gravitation — the most famous idea in the history of science.
Taking pity on the younger man, Planck broke into his pitch. “As an older friend,” he told Einstein, “I must advise you against it, for in the first place, you will not succeed; and even if you succeed, no one will believe you”…