Word: among
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...decipher and harness the forces of the cosmos. As James Gleick wrote earlier this year in the TIME 100 series, "The scientific touchstones of our age--the Bomb, space travel, electronics--all bear his fingerprints." Or, to quote a TIME cover story from 1946 (produced by Whittaker Chambers): "Among 20th-Century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intellect, intuition and imagination which are rarely combined in one mind, but which, when they do occur together, men call genius. It was all but inevitable that this genius should appear in the field of science...
Nevertheless, Franklin Roosevelt stands out among the century's political leaders. With his first-class temperament, wily manipulations and passion for experimentation, he's the jaunty face of democratic values. Thus we pick him as the foremost statesman and one of three finalists for Person of the Century. That may seem, to non-Americans, parochial. True, but this was, as our magazine's founder Henry Luce dubbed it in 1941, the American Century--politically, militarily, economically and ideologically...
...accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Albert Einstein's shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound--the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed...
...Among the consequences of this law is that if the nucleus of a uranium atom fissions (splits) into two nuclei with slightly less total mass, a tremendous amount of energy is released. In 1939, with World War II looming, a group of scientists who realized the implications of this persuaded Einstein to overcome his pacifist scruples and write a letter to President Roosevelt urging the U.S. to start a program of nuclear research. This led to the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb that exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. Some people blame the atom bomb on Einstein because he discovered...
Nature rarely bestows gifts on scientists, however, without exacting a price, and the price, in this case, takes the form of additional complications. Among other things, string theory requires the existence of up to seven dimensions in addition to the by now familiar four (height, width, length and time). It also requires the existence of an entirely new class of subatomic particles, known as supersymmetric particles, or "sparticles." Moreover, there isn't just one string theory but five. Although scientists could rule out none of them, it seemed impossible that all of them could be right...