The structure remains the third largest steerable telescope in the world and plays a key role in global research on pulsating stars, testing extreme physics theories including Einstein's general theory of relativity.

BBC: Astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell dies

And my admiration stands even though I know that the recent history of physics is filled with attempts to unify quantum mechanics and relativity that have crashed and burned.

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Einstein's special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics, " said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment.

MSN: Neutrinos clocked moving at faster-than-light speed

In particle physics, sound-bite explanations are much harder: wave-particle duality, quantum mechanics, general relativity and string theory make good mathematical sense, or so I am told, but they generally defy translation into English.

WSJ: Matt Ridley on the Higgs Boson | Mind & Matter