Word: fields
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...chief architect of the victory of World War II was Winston Churchill. The only Allied leader with military experience in the field as well as experience in government, he was also a superb communicator. Perhaps his finest contribution was his matchless power as a speaker, e.g., his stunning statement at Fulton, Mo., about "the Iron Curtain" that Joseph Stalin was dropping across Eastern Europe, and the unforgettable, even more crucial speech he made before the expected Nazi invasion of Britain: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields...
...Chambers): "Among 20th-Century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intellect, intuition and imagination which are rarely combined in one mind, but which, when they do occur together, men call genius. It was all but inevitable that this genius should appear in the field of science, for 20th-Century civilization is first & foremost technological...
Does Einstein's discomfort with quantum theory make him less a candidate for Person of the Century? Not by much. His own work contributed greatly to quantum theory and to the semiconductor revolution it spawned. And his belief in the existence of a unified field theory could well be proved right in the new century...
Although the theory of relativity fit well with the laws that govern electricity and magnetism, it wasn't compatible with Newton's law of gravity. This law said that if you changed the distribution of matter in one region of space, the change in the gravitational field would be felt instantaneously everywhere else in the universe. Not only would this mean you could send signals faster than light (something that was forbidden by relativity), but it also required the Absolute or Universal Time that relativity had abolished in favor of personal or relativistic time...
...this difficulty in 1907, while he was still at the patent office in Bern, but didn't begin to think seriously about the problem until he was at the German University in Prague in 1911. He realized that there is a close relationship between acceleration and a gravitational field. Someone in a closed box cannot tell whether he is sitting at rest in the earth's gravitational field or being accelerated by a rocket in free space. (This being before the age of Star Trek, Einstein thought of people in elevators rather than spaceships. But you cannot accelerate or fall...