Word: physicist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...writers who brought a special expertise to their subject and could also produce graceful prose. NEIL POSTMAN for example, who wrote on TV pioneer Philo Farnsworth, is the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, an acclaimed study of the impact of television on society. RICHARD RHODES, who profiled nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, wrote a Pulitzer-prizewinning tome on the making of the atom bomb. Paleoanthropologist DONALD JOHANSON, who discovered the fossil called Lucy, had a long and bumpy relationship with the Leakey family and used this occasion to break a silence with Richard Leakey that lasted nearly two decades...
...years, ENIAC's principal creators, the late John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, held the unchallenged title of inventors of the modern computer--until an obscure physicist named John Atanasoff came forth to dispute their claims. In the late 1930s, while teaching at Iowa State College, he and a graduate student named Clifford Bell began building a device that would allow them to solve large linear algebraic equations. Their machine, later called ABC (for Atanasoff Berry Computer), incorporated a number of novel features, including the separation of data processing from memory, and relied on binary numbers instead of ENIAC...
That, however, was the very thing that caught the world's imagination. Human cloning! The stuff of science fiction seemed about to become reality. Even before other labs had confirmed Wilmut's discovery, a Harvard-trained physicist named Richard Seed proclaimed his intention to clone humans for commercial purposes. Cloning, he declared grandiosely, was "the first serious step toward becoming one with...
...suddenly, the cosmological term was unnecessary. Einstein's instincts had been right, after all. His great blunder had been to doubt himself, and in 1931, during a visit to Caltech, the great and grateful physicist traveled to the top of Mount Wilson to see the telescope and thank Hubble personally for delivering him from folly...
...more than enough for the individual strips to wipe dust from the windshield of a palm-size rover that NASA and the Japanese space agency isas will use to explore an asteroid in 2003. "Clearing dust may not seem like a big deal," says Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who created the muscles. But using old-fashioned gears and motors, he says, would make the wiper mechanism "bigger and heavier than the whole rover...