Opposites Attract
Before his death in 2018, Stephen Hawking occupied the same endowed chair in Cambridge University that Isaac Newton held more than three centuries earlier. How’s that for scientific pedigree? And like Newton before him, Hawking strove to make advances in scientific understanding accessible to people who lack an in-depth education in the sciences. Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time – and its 2005 sequel A Briefer History of Time – sought to do just that.
The title of the first book made us believe that we could easily find a workable quotation from it on which to base an acrostic for The New York Times. We were mistaken. The concepts at the heart of the book – e.g., general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the relationship between them – turn out to be difficult to present in short, pithy sentences. Even for Stephen Hawking.
But we persevered and eventually found the quote in this week’s puzzle, a quote that likely resonates with people interested in both science and science fiction. For example, Star Trek fans may recall that the engines of the Enterprise used matter-antimatter reactions to power the starship’s capacity to attain warp speed. A 1975 episode of Doctor Who featured an “antimatter universe” whose inhabitants interact catastrophically with normal matter.
Back here on Earth, we also liked this quotation because it introduces the analogous theme of contronyms – words that have two meanings that are contradictory or at least point in opposite directions. Answer C., for example (“WEATHER”) is such a word. Answer P. (“SANCTION”) is another. How many others did you spy?
Clue/Answer I., harkening back to Bette Davis’s much-quoted line from All About Eve, sadly doesn’t imply opposite meanings. But it has this going for it: The American Film Institute ranks it #9 on its list of famous movie quotes. And the scene in question also includes a young Marilyn Monroe in one of her first film roles.