Word: physicist
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...Microsystems of Mountain View, Calif., to develop computers and software. Also last week, the U.S. Department of Energy signed a one-year contract with scientists at Moscow's Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy to do research on thermonuclear fusion, a potentially limitless energy source that American physicists have been struggling with for decades. Both deals are tremendous bargains for the U.S. Sun is paying Babayan's 50 or so crack computer scientists just a few hundred dollars a year apiece. And the entire 116-member Kurchatov team is being hired for $90,000 a year -- roughly the salary...
...Princeton University, physicist Thomas Stix has suggested using lasers to blast the CFCs out of the air before they can reach the stratosphere and attack the ozone. His idea is to tune the lasers to a series of wavelengths so that only the offensive molecules would be destroyed. Admittedly, the energy requirement would still be exorbitant, but Stix believes that a 20-fold improvement in the overall efficiency of this approach could make it feasible. Even so, tens of thousands of lasers would have to be designed, tested and built before the first CFC molecule could get zapped. If this...
According to the physicist, to understand his SU(5) theory, it is important to realize that electric charge is quantized and that this charge is conserved in any reaction...
Nicholson Baker is a subatomic physicist of fiction, a quantum suburban Proust. He is a wizard at anatomizing the micromechanics of mental life, at charting the quicksilver zigzags of decision and indecision, a writer who can spin out a mock epic from a pair of broken shoelaces...
Such marvels, of course, will not materialize overnight. Cautions IBM physicist Donald Eigler: "The single-atom switch looks small until you realize it took a whole roomful of equipment to make it work." Still, computer chips the size of bacteria and motors as small as molecules of myosin are rapidly moving out of the world of fantasy and into the realm of possibility. "For years, scientists have been taking atoms and molecules apart in order to understand them," says futurist K. Eric Drexler, president of the Foresight Institute in Palo Alto, Calif. "Now it's time to start figuring...