Word: 1930s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...late 1930s, however, Goddard grew troubled. He had noticed long before that of all the countries that showed an interest in rocketry, Germany showed the most. Now and then, German engineers would contact Goddard with a technical question or two, and he would casually respond. But in 1939 the Germans suddenly fell silent. With a growing concern over what might be afoot in the Reich, Goddard paid a call on Army officials in Washington and brought along some films of his various Nells. He let the generals watch a few of the launches in silence, then turned to them...
Hubble's astronomical triumphs earned him worldwide scientific honors and made him the toast of Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s--the confidant of Aldous Huxley and a friend to Charlie Chaplin, Helen Hayes and William Randolph Hearst. Yet nobody (except perhaps Hubble) could have imagined such a future when the 23-year-old Oxford graduate began his first job, in New Albany...
...personally landed in the new world four years earlier, with a newly minted Nobel Prize gold medal in his pocket, pre-eminent among a distillation of outstanding scientists who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s to escape anti-Semitic persecution in Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy--in Fermi's case, of his Jewish wife Laura...
...newly discovered neutron. They missed by the thickness of the sheet of foil in which they wrapped their uranium sample; the foil blocked the fission fragments that their instruments would otherwise have recorded. It was a blessing in disguise. If fission had come to light in the mid-1930s, while the democracies still slept, Nazi Germany would have won a long lead toward building an atom bomb. In compensation, Fermi made the most important discovery of his life, that slowing neutrons by passing them through a light-element "moderator" such as paraffin increased their effectiveness, a finding that would allow...
...demonstrated the "incompleteness of mathematics." It's not really math itself that is incomplete, but any formal system that attempts to capture all the truths of mathematics in its finite set of axioms and rules. To you that may not come as a shock, but to mathematicians in the 1930s, it upended their entire world view, and math has never been the same since...