Word: ideas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...abound among cosmologists, the most widely accepted being the Big Bang, which in no way forbids the existence of a creator who might have touched it off. One recent hypothesis holds that our universe was born as a microscopic ripple in a perfect vacuum, not so very new an idea, since Thomas Aquinas proposed something similar seven centuries ago. Although the good saint was never excommunicated for such heretical views, he was under constant fire from zealots as a sort of premature secular humanist...
...brightest star in the family firmament is Antonia. Her mother recalls that this precocious firstborn "always wrote, even before she could write -- poems, little stories. She could read before she had any idea of the meaning of the words. Frank and I called her the wonder child." Which is not to say she was candy-coated. Young Antonia was fiercely competitive, on the tennis courts with her brother Thomas and on the football team at a boys school that admitted a handful of girls on equal footing. The genesis, perhaps, of her view of woman-as-equal...
...secret history of the H-bomb written by Hans Bethe in 1952 and only recently declassified. According to Bethe, who headed the theoretical-physics division at Los Alamos during World War II, Teller's design began to fall apart shortly after Truman launched his H-bomb program. Teller's idea had been to use the heat of a conventional A-bomb to ignite a separate H-bomb. But Ulam, a brilliant mathematician, made a series of calculations that showed that the amount of tritium fuel required for Teller's bomb was prohibitive and that even when sparked...
...breakthrough idea was the recognition that the fuel would burn more efficiently if it was compressed before it was heated. According to Bethe, Ulam approached Teller with a two-stage H-bomb design that used the shock waves from an A-bomb to compact the hydrogen and ignite the H-bomb. Teller adapted Ulam's design, using the energy of the A-bomb's radiation rather than the force of its shock waves to achieve the necessary compression. It was a bomb of this design, code named Mike, that exploded on Nov. 1, 1952, on the Pacific island of Elugelab...
...work?" "The Super." Teller has partially confirmed his debt to Ulam. After suffering a heart attack in 1979, he dictated an account of the day Ulam walked into his office and said he had a way to make the bomb. Teller, though, heatedly disputes the notion that the key idea was Ulam's. "That is not correct," he says. "I do not want to say what is correct. It is a long and complicated story. Someday I will write it down...