Word: majority
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...construction of the Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain. Four times as powerful as the Hooker, the Hale would be the largest telescope on Earth for four decades. It would have been even longer, but its completion was interrupted by World War II. So was Hubble's career. The ex-major signed on as head of ballistics at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. (At one point the eminent astronomer spent an afternoon test-firing bazookas, at great personal risk, to pinpoint a design flaw...
Hubble finally got his hands on the Hale when it went into service in 1949. It was too late; he had suffered a major heart attack, and he never fully regained the stamina it took to spend all night in a freezing-cold observatory. No imaginable discovery, however, could have added to his reputation...
...would like to watch philosophers squirm--and who wouldn't?--pose this tough question: Suppose you may either a) solve a major philosophical problem so conclusively that there is nothing left to say (thanks to you, part of the field closes down forever, and you get a footnote in history); or b) write a book of such tantalizing perplexity and controversy that it stays on the required-reading list for centuries to come. Which would you choose? Many philosophers will reluctantly admit that they would go for option b). If they had to choose, they would rather be read than...
...Allegheny Valley town of Springdale, Pa., was first published in the St. Nicholas literary magazine for children. A reader and loner and devotee of birds, and indeed all nature, the slim, shy girl of plain face and dark curly hair continued writing throughout adolescence, chose an English major at Pennsylvania College for Women and continued to submit poetry to periodicals. Not until junior year, when a biology course reawakened the "sense of wonder" with which she had always encountered the natural world, did she switch her major to zoology, not yet aware that her literary and scientific passions might...
...Salk's major patron at Michigan, however, proved to be no one man but the whole U.S. Army, which needed a flu vaccine at once to help win World War II and was happy to complete Salk's education in speed under pressure. After that, it was a snap for him to set up his own peacetime lab at the University of Pittsburgh and equip it to the gills for the Great Crusade--the one that every immunologist in the world then had his eye on--against the Great White Whale itself, poliomyelitis...