Word: atom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Often it was hard to pick one person to credit for a particular advance. Some cases involved famous rivalries, such as Farnsworth vs. Vladimir Zworykin over inventing television, or Jonas Salk vs. Albert Sabin over developing a polio vaccine. Other cases, such as the creation of the atom bomb or the computer, involved a series of contributions. Although there is a danger in personalizing history, there is also an advantage. By choosing the people we feel were most responsible for key breakthroughs, and then exploring their relations and rivalries, we hope to convey the human excitement that makes real...
Space and time are relative. Our behavior is ruled by our subconscious mind. The most powerful machines are built one atom at a time. When the history of human civilization is rewritten a few centuries hence, the name Eric Drexler just might appear alongside those of Einstein and Freud. Drexler, 43, is the founding father of nanotechnology, the idea of using individual atoms and molecules to build practical machines...
They arose chiefly from his opposition to nuclear weapons. After the first atom bombs were used, he began giving speeches expressing his concern that our nation's growing anticommunist fears were forcing us into an insane nuclear-weapons race. He was broadly labeled a pink, if not a red. J. Edgar Hoover personally pursued him, Senator McCarthy called him a security risk, and the State Department took away his passport...
This is the century that split the atom, probed the psyche, spliced genes and cloned a sheep. It invented plastic, radar and the silicon chip. It built airplanes, rockets, satellites, televisions, computers and atom bombs. It overthrew our inherited ideas about logic, language, learning, mathematics, economics and even space and time. And behind each of these great ideas, great discoveries and great inventions is, in most cases, one extraordinary human mind...
...19th century was the century of chemistry, the 20th was the century of physics. The burgeoning science supported such transforming applications as medical imaging, nuclear reactors, atom and hydrogen bombs, radio and television, transistors, computers and lasers. Physical knowledge increased so rapidly after 1900 that theory and experiment soon divided into separate specialties. Enrico Fermi, a supremely self-assured Italian American born in Rome in 1901, was the last great physicist to bridge the gap. His theory of beta decay introduced the last of the four basic forces known in nature (gravity, electromagnetism and, operating within the nucleus...