Word: lightful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wall. It's also evident in the long, shallow staircase that slices through the building like a rapier. From this staircase visitors can get fleeting glimpses of the art from unusual perspectives, a pattern that's repeated throughout the gallery, which is punctuated with jagged openings (some bringing in light from the skylights on the top floor) and unexpected views. "Instead of seeing the sanctified object fixed in its niche," Hadid says about viewing the art, she wanted to "create a richer, more perplexing experience, taking your body through a journey of compression, release, reflection, disorientation, epiphany...
Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one truly was the work of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his lab working on it. William Shockley may have fathered the transistor, but two of his research scientists actually built it. And if there ever was a thing that was made by committee, the Internet--with its protocols and packet switching--is it. But the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more...
What good is a brilliantly intense, tightly focused beam of light? It can make a dandy weapon or torture device, as Sean Connery found to his dismay in the James Bond film Goldfinger. But while laser weaponry never really took off, lasers certainly did. Today they are used for, among other things, dentists' drills and delicate eye surgery, recording and playing back compact discs, measuring the distance to the moon, creating and viewing holograms, industrial cutting and welding, sending voices and data through the air and down optical fibers, surveying roads and building sites, generating energy in controlled-nuclear-fusion...
...picture in hand. Land was convinced he could shortcut this laborious process by creating a camera that did all the work itself, and by 1947 he had done it. Instead of conventional film, the Polaroid Land Camera was loaded with photographic paper coated with a paste of light-sensitive chemicals. A mere 60 sec. after the photographer tripped the shutter, out popped a snapshot. The first Polaroids were black-and-white; the company introduced color in 1963. Land's invention added a new dimension to photography, but for him it was just another stop on a long scientific journey...
...French physicist Louis de Broglie describes his theory that all matter behaves as both a particle and a wave, just as light does; this notion will lead to the electron microscope...