Word: one
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...18th century, for example, was clearly one marked by statecraft: in 1776 alone there are Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin writing the Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith publishing The Wealth of Nations and George Washington leading the Revolutionary forces. The 17th century, on the other hand, despite such colorful leaders as Louis XIV and the ch?teau he left us, will be most remembered for its science: Galileo exploring gravity and the solar system, Descartes developing modern philosophy and Newton discovering the laws of motion and calculus. And the 16th will be remembered for the flourishing of the arts...
...Indeed, one defining aspect of our century has been the degree to which it was shaped not just by powerful political leaders but also by ordinary folks who civilly disobeyed: Nelson Mandela organizing a campaign in 1952 to defy South Africa's "pass laws" by entering white townships, Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus just as Gandhi had on the South African train, the unknown rebel blocking the line of tanks rumbling toward Tiananmen Square, Lech Walesa leading his fellow Polish workers out on strike, the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst launching hunger strikes, American...
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...
...1930s Alan Turing first described the computer--a machine that could perform logical functions based on whatever instructions were fed to it--and then proceeded to help build one in the early 1940s that cracked the German wartime codes. His concepts were refined by other computer pioneers: John von Neumann, John Atanasoff, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly...
Meanwhile, another group of scientists--including Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer--was unlocking the power of the atom in a different way, one that led to the creation of a weapon that helped win the war and define the subsequent five decades of nervous peace that ensued...