Word: mightly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been. His Alliance for Progress, Bill Clinton wrote recently in an editorial for the New York Times, is pledged to "elevate hope over fear and tomorrow over yesterday." Rousing words, but who's to say that tomorrow is better than yesterday, those in Sri Lanka or Peru might say, and why should we put hope (based on what might happen) over fear (based on what has palpably happened)? It isn't self-evident that mankind is really progressing, at a level deeper than machines, any more than it is that any of us is wiser than our parents...
Years ago, when some of us began thinking about who might be Person of the Century, Albert Einstein was one person who made each of our short lists. It was, above all, a century that would be remembered for advances in science and technology. Einstein stood out as its greatest scientific genius, and his work touched the most important fields of technology: nuclear weapons, television, space travel, lasers and semiconductors...
Alerted by the emigre Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard to the possibility that the Germans might build an atom bomb, he wrote F.D.R. of the danger, even though he knew little about recent developments in nuclear physics. When Szilard told Einstein about chain reactions, he was astonished: "I never thought about that at all," he said. Later, when he learned of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he uttered a pained sigh...
...starting his professional career now rather than at the turn of the past century, would have overcome his deep distrust of quantum mechanics and enthusiastically embraced branes and sparticles and superstrings. And given his almost superhuman ability to transcend conventional thinking and visualize the world in unprecedented ways, he might have been the one to crack the ultimate theory. It may in the end take an Einstein to complete Einstein's unfinished intellectual symphony...
...utterly fearless, and by its uses he diminished fear in others. "It stands to the everlasting credit of science," Einstein wrote, "that by acting on the human mind, it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature." And so he became a model of what humans might do if they put their mind...