Word: atomically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. Edith H. Quimby, 91, biophysicist whose research helped to pinpoint the optimal dosage of radiation for various medical purposes, particularly its use in cancer therapy; in New York City. Part of the atom bomb-building Manhattan Project during World War II, she was nonetheless a Cassandra who warned about the dangers of radiation as early as the 1920s...
...Theodore M. Hesburgh at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia: "The nuclear threat is indeed the greatest moral problem of all times. For Theodore Hesburgh the years of the nuclear age, we humans have been painting ourselves into a corner. As Albert Einstein said, 'The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.' Perhaps the worst attitude is to say that nothing can be done about it, that tensions between nations cannot be relieved, that the ultimate destiny of all that is good and true and beautiful...
...burglary attempt." The cause (a moment of incompetent political espionage) did not seem commensurate with the effect (the resignation of the President), not in the usual Newtonian laws of action and reaction. Watergate was more like an event in quantum physics. A particle of history as minuscule as an atom produced a cataclysm...
...after they read that two German scientists had split the atom, the Oppenheimers knew the possible end of that equation: a bomb of almost incomprehensible destructiveness. A problem remained, however: how to build it. After the U.S. entered the war, Oppie was assigned the chief responsibility of figuring that out. At the secret Los Alamos laboratory, he led-and occasionally pushed and shoved-an extraordinary gathering of the country's top minds in constructing the instrument that exploded atop a tower in the desert. When the test bomb detonated, he silently repeated to himself a line from the Bhagavad...
...father of the atom bomb, Oppenheimer enjoyed a postwar eminence equaled perhaps by only one other scientist, Einstein himself. But his fall was even swifter than his rise. He was a political innocent who had never read a newspaper or current-affairs magazine until he was in his mid-30s and did not hear, incredibly enough, about the Great Crash of 1929 until long after it had happened. At Berkeley he associated mostly with leftists-his lover and his brother were both Communists-and although he was never a Communist himself, he lent his name to left-wing organizations...