Word: stephen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Einstein, the obvious choice was Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest living theoretical physicists. His classic work, A Brief History of Time, has sold close to 9 million copies and was made into a PBS series that he narrated through his voice synthesizer (he has ALS, known as Lou Gehrig's disease). He's best known for devising theories of the Big Bang and black holes based on Einstein's work. We e-mailed Hawking at his Cambridge lab earlier this year to convince him of the importance of explaining Einstein at the end of his century...
More important, he serves as a symbol of all the scientists--such as Heisenberg, Bohr, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, even the ones he disagreed with--who built upon his work to decipher and harness the forces of the cosmos. As James Gleick wrote earlier this year in the TIME 100 series, "The scientific touchstones of our age--the Bomb, space travel, electronics--all bear his fingerprints." Or, to quote a TIME cover story from 1946 (produced by Whittaker Chambers): "Among 20th-Century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intellect, intuition and imagination which...
...sued the school system to change those rules. And other home-school advocates have taken this issue to Michigan's legislature, where it has split the Republican Party. For Tolbert, it's an issue of basic fairness: "The state should provide these [athletic] benefits on a nondiscriminatory basis," says Stephen Safranek, the lawyer behind the Tolberts and six other families. "We all pay the same taxes...
This elasticizing of space-time means, for example, that observers might disagree over which of two events happened first--and both could be right. Even more bizarrely, physicists including Stephen Hawking have seriously discussed the possibility that relativity might make it feasible (though not with any technology we know of today) to send objects backward in time...
...angry young filmmaker has an eye for rapturous compositions on a huge and telling tapestry. His new film mixes DeMille and Dostoyevsky: the cast-of-thousands splendor of a biblical epic and the gnarled psychology of Chen's own Farewell My Concubine. And all in less time than a Stephen King prison drama...