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Almost everyone at the studio admired how Walt, in either conducting them or flitting among them, forged them into a unit.
warping of spacetime,” in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: “In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.” Of course the sagging mattress analogy can take us only so far because it doesn't incorporate the effect of time. But then our brains can take us only so far because it is so nearly impossible to envision a dimension comprising three parts space to one part time, all interwoven like the threads in a plaid fabric. At all events, I think we can agree that this was an awfully big thought for a young man staring out the window of a patent office in the capital of Switzerland. Among much else, Einstein's general theory of relativity suggested that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. But Einstein was not a cosmologist, and he accepted the prevailing wisdom that the universe was fixed and eternal. More or less reflexively, he dropped into his equations something called the cosmological constant, which arbitrarily counterbalanced the effects of gravity, serving as a kind of mathematical pause button. Books on the history of science always forgive Einstein this lapse, but it was actually a fairly appalling piece of science and he knew it. He called it “the biggest blunder of my life.” Coincidentally, at about the time that Einstein was affixing a cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, an astronomer with the cheerily intergalactic name of Vesto Slipher (who was in fact from Indiana) was taking spectrographic readings of distant stars and discovering that they appeared to be moving away from us. The universe wasn't static. The stars Slipher looked at showed unmistakable signs of a Doppler shift*19
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
To open a Portillo’s is not cheap. You have to have a hell of a lot of money to compete with Portillo’s. You are going to spend $5, $6 million on just the training, the research, the construction, the land. It’s not an easy concept, but that’s by design. That’s the moat that has long protected us. I remember one time Jim Cantalupo was in line at my restaurant in Downers Grove, which we opened in 1983 as our seventh restaurant and was relocated in 1997. Jim—standing in line next to construction workers and soccer moms—served as chairman and chief executive officer of McDonald’s Corporation until his sudden death by heart attack at the age of 60 in 2004. Jim told me, “You know, if you could ever simplify this, you could open a lot of these places but it’s very complex.” I told Jim that I didn’t want to simplify it because that will invite competition.
Out of the Dog House
Dick Portillo, Don Yaeger
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