Word: physicist
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...Greeks needed only their powerful intellects and imaginations to postulate atoms as the basic building blocks of matter. Today, more than ever before, such exploration requires complicated machines like Fermilab's Tevatron. By pummeling the nucleus, the atom's central mass, with protons or other subatomic particles, physicists can literally tear apart the fabric of matter, somewhat like peeling layers from an onion. Every peel, however, requires increasingly powerful and costlier machines. As Stanford Physicist Wolfgang Panofsky notes, "The smaller the objects, the bigger the microscope we must use to see them...
...Physicists have long known that the photon, or light particle, was the carrier of electromagnetism. In 1979 in Hamburg, West Germany, they discovered the gluon, which conveys the strong force. This year CERN scored its crowning achievement by confirming the existence of three particles, the W+, W-and Z°, known collectively as intermediate vector bosons. They were predicted to be the agency of the weak force. That feat was a coup for a resurgent European physics community struggling to get back on its feet after World War II. It also irritated American scientists, who had regarded themselves...
Herman Kahn, who died last week at his home in Chappaqua, N.Y., of a heart attack at 61, was a mathematician, physicist, economist, weapons analyst and historian. But above all he was a provocateur in the sedate world of ideas, a futurist who attempted, in his own words, "to cope with history before it happens." He was a pioneer in using scientific and mathematical tools to project the future. With his 300-lb. bulk and a florid face framed by a tailored white beard, Kahn had a commanding presence that seemed to complement a mental and verbal vigor bordering...
...condition for which the Soviet government has refused the treatment he requests, and had to stage a hunger strike 18 months ago to win permission for his daughter-in-law to leave the U.S.S.R. and join her husband in the U.S. But despite his internal exile and straitened circumstances, Physicist Andrei Sakharov, 62, wrote and somehow conveyed to American Physicist Sidney Drell a long open letter detailing his views on control of the nuclear weapons he once helped the Kremlin to develop...
Excerpts from Andrei Sakharov's open letter to American Physicist Sidney Drell...