Word: kept
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...science as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. A tall, powerfully built young man, he excelled at basketball and boxing (fight promoters reportedly tried to talk him into turning pro), and his combination of academic and athletic prowess earned him a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. In England, Hubble kept up his muscular pursuits: he fought, ran track and played on one of the first baseball teams ever organized in the British Isles...
Hubble's skills as an astronomer were impressive enough to earn him an offer from the prestigious Mount Wilson Observatory. World War I kept him from accepting right away, but in 1919 the newly discharged Major Hubble--as he invariably introduced himself--arrived at observatory headquarters, still in uniform but ready to start observing with the just completed 100-in. Hooker Telescope, the most powerful on earth...
...relativity had told him that the universe must either be expanding or contracting, yet astronomers had told him it was doing neither. Against his better judgment, Einstein had uglied up his elegant equations with an extra factor he called the cosmological term--a sort of antigravity force that kept the universe from collapsing in on itself...
...gifts went unrecognized. He disliked pretension, preferring simplicity and concreteness, and the philosophic German style may have repelled him. "Not a philosopher," the American theorist J. Robert Oppenheimer later sketched him. "Passion for clarity. He was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active." He won appointment as professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome at 25 and quickly assembled a small group of first-class young talents for his self-appointed task of reviving Italian physics. Judging him infallible, they nicknamed him "the Pope...
...below-zero cold. That morning the State Department announced that 2 million Jews had perished in Europe and 5 million more were in danger; American boys and Japanese were dying at Guadalcanal. It was cold inside the squash court, and the crowd of scientists who assembled on the balcony kept on their overcoats...