Word: nonscientist
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Only a handful of scientists understood what it was all about. The nonscientist simply took the handful's word on faith. It took him 40 years to see the proof that E = mc² means that an ounce of matter-sand, oxygen, uranium-holds within itself as much energy as that given off by the explosion of 875,000 tons of TNT. But in the flash of Hiroshima...
...tale to tell that flashed back to 1932. He had talked at a Russian scientific meeting about a paper by an English astronomer and a German physicist who suggested that the energy radiated by the sun and other stars was caused by reactions between atomic nuclei. A nonscientist, Nikolai Bukharin, a top Communist official in the post-Lenin era, approached Gamow. He asked Gamow if nuclear reactions like those of the sun could be created on earth and put to some use. Bukharin even offered to turn over the Leningrad electrical works to Gamow for a few hours every night...
...college heads sent Professor Cole packing off to Maine to write a text on physics and the modern world, precisely because he was an amateur in the subject. They guessed rightly that the freshmen would understand it better if a nonscientist wrote it. Professor Cole compressed a summer's reading into some 100 pages, which the Physics Department promptly approved; he thought the assignment "a lot of fun." He is the kind of man who, when he accepted a post as visiting lecturer at Yale, spent the time commuting from Amherst teaching himself Spanish...