Word: chandrasekhar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, 73, of the University of Chicago and William A. Fowler, 72, of Caltech for their work on the evolution of stars. The winner of the chemistry prize was Stanford's Henry Taube, 67, for his elucidation of the basic mechanisms of complex chemical reactions. Scientists agreed that the honors were long overdue. Including the previously announced medicine prize, this year's list of laureates gave the U.S. its first clean sweep in the Nobel science prizes since 1976 and continued four decades of American domination of the awards...
...Chandrasekhar, who got word of the award on his birthday, is a slight, 5-ft. 6-in. scholar with a shy manner, a preference for black suits and a love of Tolstoy, Mozart and Beethoven. Born in Lahore, then part of India, to a prominent Hindu family (his physicist uncle, Sir Chandrasekhara Raman, won a Nobel in 1930), Chandra, as he is called by physicists everywhere, began the work for which he was cited more than a half-century ago. In 1930, when he was only 19 years old, he whiled away the long shipboard hours...
...Unlike Chandrasekhar, whom he regards as his idol, the Pittsburgh-born Fowler is cherubically gregarious, almost as devoted to his beloved Pirates and old locomotives as to physics. His chief scientific interest: the nuclear reactions deep within the fiery interiors of stars. Chandra's work together with Fowler's, says University of Chicago Astronomy Professor John Simpson, "formed the basis for making models of the death and birth of stars." By the 1950s, astronomers realized that most of the universe's 90-odd elements, or types of atoms, had been "cooked" not at the moment...