Word: physicist
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McPhee is not a physicist but a journalist, one of the very best now writing, who specializes in the long, reportorial essay. He has written books about such things as oranges, tennis, ecology, an unlikely tract of New Jersey outback called the Pine Barrens and a group of men who tried to reinvent the zeppelin. Like all journalists dealing with science, McPhee is tethered by limitations in his readers' knowledge and imagination...
Writing about nuclear physics and the creative process of a bomb maker for an audience that does not understand mathematics, moreover, is a bit like writing music criticism for the deaf. McPhee manages very well, using the life and thought of Theoretical Physicist Ted Taylor as a way into the subject. The reader, balancing his head carefully so that the neutrons won't spill out, is led an enormous distance, to the point where a good many of Taylor's calculations seem understandable...
Much later we see Taylor middleaged, a figure of high reputation among his colleagues, now disaffected with bomb making and no longer at work as a nuclear physicist. He directs an ecological-research firm. He and McPhee travel about the country. He shows the author unguarded trucks rumbling down rural highways, loaded with weapons-grade uranium. They see manufacturing plants where enough fissionable material to blow up Manhattan could be stolen by one armed and determined man, or carried off bit by bit, undetected, by one unarmed employee...
...year 2050, the earth may be dangerously overpopulated and polluted. Even so, says a Princeton University scientist, there might be a way out for some of the world's teeming billions. By that time, according to Physicist Gerard K. O'Neill, streams of earthlings could well be en route to comfortable new homes in space...
...deuterium or tritium with a powerful pulse of laser light, they cause the explosive evaporation of the pellet's surface. As the material sprays off, the rest of the pellet implodes. The hydrogen nuclei are thus forced together. As early as 1968, a team of Soviet researchers under Physicist Nikolai Basov, a Nobel laureate, reported that they had used lasers to ignite a brief but clearly detectable fusion reaction. Since then, their experiments have been repeated-and improved upon-in a number of countries, including the U.S., France, Britain and West Germany. But scientists are not yet certain that...