Word: physicist
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Given some commonplace materials, a simple lab and a certain amount of fissionable uranium or plutonium, almost any competent physicist can build an atom bomb nowadays. This unfortunate fact of technological life has stirred dire warnings that sophisticated terrorist groups might build such bombs and use them to blackmail the world -a kind of ultimate crime. While the prospect causes a great deal of official worry, it also provides almost any competent thriller writer with a readymade plot that has everything: timeliness, tremendous stakes and, above all, the appalling specter of a mushroom cloud billowing over a peaceful land...
...face of it, Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris promises a Russian version of Star Trek. Russian physicist, Gibaryan, a psychologist and "solarist" to determine what has made over 80 scientists desert or die aboard the space-ship Solaris, a lab set up to study an oozing, brain-colored body of liquid on another planet. Yet Gibaryan soon confronts the likelihood that the ocean Solaris may actually represent his own subconscious, and Tarkovsky appears to be attempting the same sort of space consciousness analogy Kubrick hinted at in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe...
Wilson is a high-energy physicist, who for the past decade has received approximately $1.25 million in research monies every year from the Energy Research Development Agency (ERDA...
Such famous figures as the scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla and Physicist Michael Pupin come to our memory. So do the names of the violinist and philanthropist Zlatko Balokovic, one of the founders and chairman of the Society of Friends of New Yugoslavia in the U.S.; of Louis Adamic, the author and publicist; Ivan Mestrovic, great genius of sculpture; and many others...
Long Odds. Such apparent inconsistencies are trivial when compared with the slipshod logic of one of Temple's major premises. He invokes the belief of such sympathetic star trackers as Astronomer Carl Sagan and Astro physicist I.S. Shklovski'ï that intelligent life probably exists elsewhere in our galaxy. Out of billions of planets, so the argument goes, statistical probability dic tates that there must be some that have evolved like earth. But Temple seems confused about probability. "The odds against life occurring fairly frequently within our galaxy are impossible ones," he writes. In fact, odds must be long...