Word: physicist
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...atomic weight. It is Russian chemistry professor Dmitri Mendeleev, however, who is credited with developing the first real table in 1869. He organized the 63 then known elements into groups with similar properties and left some spaces blank for those whose existence he could not yet prove. In 1913 physicist Henry Moseley's experiments showed definitively that the order was dependent not on atomic weight but on atomic number--the number of protons in an atom's nucleus...
...second idea further complicates the ideological position of traditional econometricians by borrowing heavily from physicist Werner Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty. If the observer adds an element of uncertainty by the mere fact of observing, then fully determined prediction is not a matter of how much data one can gather. Rather, it is “computationally intractable,” meaning that if there were an answer, the amount of data required to compute it is beyond not only our current methods, but anything we could ever achieve—we just cannot expect computers to model...
...other words, we're going to need Michael Beard, a rotund, balding, 50-ish English physicist coasting on a Nobel Prize he won two decades ago. As Solar begins, Beard is in the waning days of his fifth marriage, hanging on as the chief of a government center on renewable energy, where climate change takes up less space in his mind than adultery. "Beard was not wholly skeptical about climate change," McEwan writes. "But he himself had other things to think about." (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...harnessing sunlight to split water and yield hydrogen and oxygen, which can be used to drive fuel cells and provide cheap, clean electricity. The earth will be saved, as will Beard's flagging career (and bank account). An unrepentant narcissist at heart, Beard has no trouble transitioning from disinterested physicist to clean-energy messiah, addressing conference halls full of skeptical businesspeople. "Now planetary stupidity was his business," McEwan writes - a slogan I should really put on the back of my business cards...
Cheung cites physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, as one of his biggest inspirations and likes to say that humans, like dinosaurs, could go extinct—a disaster that space exploration could somehow ameliorate...