Word: physicist
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...fear of intellectual inadequacy, of powerlessness before the tireless electronic wizards, has given rise to dozens of science-fiction fantasies of computer takeovers. In The Tale of the Big Computer, by Swedish Physicist Hannes Alfven, written under the pen name Olof Johannesson, the human beings of today become the horses of tomorrow. The world runs not for man but for the existence and welfare of computers...
...Harvard machine occupied a large room and sounded, in the words of Physicist-Author Jeremy Bernstein, "like a roomful of ladies knitting." The noise came from the rapid opening and closing of thousands of little switches, and it represented an enormous information flow and extremely long calculations for the time. In less than five seconds, Mark I could multiply two 23-digit numbers, a record that lasted until ENIAC'S debut two years later. But how? In part, the answer lies in a beguilingly simple form of arithmetic: the binary system. Instead of the ten digits (0 through...
...malfunction in the measuring equipment. "It is unlikely there is anything on the ground," he said about the Soviet reactor. That was puzzling, since the chief of the crew manning the equipment on the original sniffer plane was a U.S. Air Force specialist who is a highly respected nuclear physicist and unlikely to be confused by false sensor readings. Were the Canadians and Americans trying to bluff the Russians into thinking that their spacecraft had totally disintegrated? No one on the outside could be sure. The search for localized radiation continued into the weekend...
...quickly discovered that "the more eminent they were, the more ready to run to us with their ignorance." Some of the contributors are indeed eminent: Molecular Biologists Francis Crick and Sir John Kendrew. Chemist Linus Pauling (all Nobel laureates), Anthropologist Donald Johanson, Astronomers Sir Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Physicist John Wheeler. The conundrums they pose are also notable. How did the universe come into being? Why do we sleep? How are galaxies formed? What is consciousness? Why does a species become extinct? The problem that the experts had simply in formulating these questions is perhaps best expressed by Mathematician...
Ignorance abounds in the physical sciences as well. Astronomer Douglas Gough points out that the inner structure, composition, and workings of the sun, let alone distant stars, remain a mystery and that even sunspots, which were recorded by the ancient Chinese, still defy understanding. Theoretical Physicist Abdus Salam concedes that science could fail in the search for a basic particle of matter, that probing deeper into the structure of matter may yield ever-more-basic particles...