Word: atomics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...funding. Unemployment runs high in many scientific disciplines; the number of young people drawn to the laboratory in certain key areas has diminished significantly. Indifference to scientific achievement is the mood of the moment. Even such bold ventures as new voyages to the moon or Mars, construction of giant atom smashers, and journeys to the depths of the sea fail to excite a public that is half jaded, half doubtful of the future benefits of such extravagant undertakings...
Reverberations from the Uncertainty Principle are still being felt. Heisenberg has recently used it to argue against constructing even bigger (and more expensive) atom smashers on the ground that little more of a fundamental nature can be learned of the sub-nuclear world. In his controversial book The Coming of the Gold en Age, Molecular Biologist Gunther Stent brashly assumes that all basic questions in his field are either solved or close to solution. He also thinks that all scientific progress is fast approaching the point of diminishing returns. Man will never know how the universe began or what...
...skills as a popularizer of modern quantum physics to buttress his beliefs. Matter, he notes, quoting Bertrand Russell, is "a convenient formula for describing what happens where it isn't." An absurdity? Not to the new generation of quantum physicists, says Koestler. No longer able to accept the atom as simply a miniature solar system in which negatively charged electrons blithely circle the positive nucleus, they found that the "electrons kept jumping from one orbit into a different orbit without passing through intervening space - as if the earth were suddenly transferred into the orbit of Mars without having...
...Kennedy and Johnson on national security and disarmament, he succeeded Oppenheimer in 1966. The switch from scholar-intellectual to action-intellectual offended many of the mathematicians. Even worse, Kaysen and the trustees announced that they intended to found a New School of Social Sciences. "We know more about the atom than about ourselves," Kaysen says, "and the consequences are everywhere to be seen...
...that seems to obsess the 20th century. Staring into the glassy eyes of the madman, just what does one see reflected? An empty room? A fellow sufferer? The family circle, crowding close? An entire culture? Students of mind seem to have learned from students of matter that the smashed atom will reveal astonishing forces lurking within the normal...