Word: four
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Four years ago, a group of lesbian and gay Vermonters got together in the basement of an Episcopal church to plot the redefinition of marriage. Among them were a nurse, a few lawyers and a pair of Christmas-tree farmers. They thought the state should treat their relationships no differently from those of heterosexuals, and they eventually brought a lawsuit...
...look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms," he said. He proceeded to list them: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. One of the great themes of this century was the progress made toward each of them...
Watson had sketched out how four chemical bases paired to create a self-copying code at the core of the double-helix-shaped DNA molecule. In the more formal announcement of their discovery, a one-page paper in the journal Nature, they noted the significance in a famously understated sentence: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." But they were less restrained when persuading Watson's sister to type up the paper for them. "We told her," Watson wrote in The Double Helix, "that...
Cavalier as he may have been about his wives, he had a deep moral sense. At the height of World War I, he risked the Kaiser's wrath by signing an antiwar petition, one of only four scientists in Germany to do so. Yet, paradoxically, he helped develop a gyrocompass for U-boats. During the troubled 1920s, when Jews were being singled out by Hitler's rising Nazi Party as the cause of Germany's defeat and economic woes, Einstein and his "Jewish physics" were a favorite target. Nazis, however, weren't his only foes. For Stalinists, relativity represented rampant...
Nature rarely bestows gifts on scientists, however, without exacting a price, and the price, in this case, takes the form of additional complications. Among other things, string theory requires the existence of up to seven dimensions in addition to the by now familiar four (height, width, length and time). It also requires the existence of an entirely new class of subatomic particles, known as supersymmetric particles, or "sparticles." Moreover, there isn't just one string theory but five. Although scientists could rule out none of them, it seemed impossible that all of them could be right...