Word: bitted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reason we all have such great friends, the reason I sometimes think my life is a bit like the movies, is because Harvard is the best university in the country. Certainly, Harvard has its problems, some of which are quite serious. But on balance, the Harvard experience deserves at least 99 percent of its renown. We were all lured here by the Harvard reputation, which turned out--at least in my personal experience--to be underrated...
Godel the man was every bit as eccentric as his theories. He and his wife Adele, a dancer, fled the Nazis in 1939 and settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked with Einstein. In his later years Godel grew paranoid about the spread of germs, and he became notorious for compulsively cleaning his eating utensils and wearing ski masks with eye holes wherever he went. He died at age 72 in a Princeton hospital, essentially because he refused to eat. Much as formal systems, thanks to their very power, are doomed to incompleteness, so living...
...technological nightmares of the day--the cost and unreliability of the vacuum tubes used as valves to control the flow of electrons in radios and telephone-relay systems--lay in solid-state physics. Vacuum tubes were hot, bulky, fragile and short-lived. Crystals, particularly crystals that can conduct a bit of electricity, could do the job faster, more reliably and with 1 million times less power--if only someone could get them to function as electronic valves. Shockley and his team figured out how to accomplish this trick. Understanding of the significance of the invention of what came...
...inevitable that whoever was first to allay such fears would become a national hero. "The Man Who Saved the Children" should be good for a statue in every town in the world. And since the odds of a microbiologist's becoming even a little bit famous are a lot worse than 5,000 to 1, it was perhaps inevitable that this hero's achievements would immediately be disputed. In a scientific field so heavily manned, findings routinely crisscross and even minor discoveries can leave a trail of claims and counterclaims, not to mention envy and acrimony, that are truly incurable...
When the war ended, Mengele fled to South America. He died there in 1979 and was buried quietly under an assumed name. His remains were disinterred and identified in 1985--a too late bit of proof that even the Ubermensch can come to an ignoble...