Word: working
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hope. The more traditional cultures of the world, in turn, have brought into America pieces of the past--Ayurvedic medicine, say, or Tai Chi, and, more deeply, a sense of community and continuity that has breathed new life into the "old-fashioned" American values of family loyalty and hard work. In cultures as in households, the old pass on their wisdom, and the young bring their reviving innocence...
...problem comes, however, when past and future converge on the present moment--which is all we have to work with--and fight it out for supremacy. The old habitually say that everything was better when they were young--let's go back. The young are by nature sure that everything will be better when they come of age--let's go forward. In the former Yugoslavia, in Somalia and the Middle East, America has come in saying, "Make a fresh start!" And those caught in their ancestral rivalries reply, "How can we make a pact with the future until...
...began thinking about who might be Person of the Century, Albert Einstein was one person who made each of our short lists. It was, above all, a century that would be remembered for advances in science and technology. Einstein stood out as its greatest scientific genius, and his work touched the most important fields of technology: nuclear weapons, television, space travel, lasers and semiconductors...
...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...
...better or worse, personified our times and will be recorded by history as having the most lasting significance. I explain how we arrived at that conclusion in a story on page 48. Let us know if you agree. Either way, I'm confident that you'll appreciate the work of the great writers who make personal the legacies of all three of our finalists...