Word: physicist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that shaggy head managed to revolutionize our concepts of time, space, motion--the very foundations of physical reality--not just once but several times during his astonishing career. Yet while there clearly had to be something remarkable about Einstein's brain, the pathologist who removed it from the great physicist's skull after his death reported that the organ was, to all appearances, well within the normal range--no bigger or heavier than anyone else...
Maldacena has also earned the respect of his peers outside of Harvard. At a 1998, conference at which he presented his work, a physicist from the University of Chicago turned his complicated theories into lyrics and convinced the 300 theoretical physicists at the conference to dance to a parody titled "Hey, Maldacena...
...Sakharov abandoned his cocooned life as his country's leading physicist to risk everything in battle against the two great threats to civilization in the second half of this century: nuclear war and communist dictatorship. In the dark, bitter depths of the cold war, Sakharov's voice rang out. "A miracle occurred," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "when Andrei Sakharov emerged in the Soviet state, among the swarms of corrupt, venal, unprincipled intelligentsia." By the time of his death in 1989, this humble physicist had influenced the spread of democratic ideals throughout the communist world. His moral challenge to tyranny, his faith...
...that science was a force for rationality and, from there, democracy: that in politics as in science, objective truths can be arrived at only through a testing of hypotheses, a democratic consensus "based on a profound study of facts, theories and views, presupposing unprejudiced and open discussion." As a physicist, he believed that physical laws are immutable, applying to all things in nature. As a result, he regarded certain human values--such as liberty and the respect for individual dignity--as inviolable and universal. It is not surprising that in China today, many of the most outspoken advocates of political...
...Soviet treaty banning nuclear explosions in space, in the atmosphere and underwater. Khrushchev later called Sakharov "a crystal of morality"--but still one that could not be tolerated within the regime. The Kremlin took away his security privileges and ended his career as a nuclear physicist. But, Sakharov later said, "the atomic issue was a natural path into political issues." He campaigned for disarmament and turned his attention to the Soviet system, denouncing its stagnancy and intolerance of dissent. So uncompromising was his critique of the regime that it estranged him from his children...