Word: physicist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
James Watson remembers cringing when his colleague Francis Crick announced to regulars at the Eagle, a pub in Cambridge, England, that they had discovered "the secret of life." True, the onetime ornithologist and the former physicist had created a plausible model for the structure of DNA that morning. If they were right, biologists would finally understand how parents pass characteristics on to their children--not only hair and eye color but every aspect of how the human body is built and how it operates. Watson, at left in photo, and Crick would have solved the mysteries of heredity...
...that night at the Soviet embassy on Washington's Sixteenth Street. New York Times science reporter Walter Sullivan was called to the phone and told that Moscow had announced that it had put a satellite into orbit. He hurried back and whispered the news in the ear of U.S. physicist Lloyd Berkner, who rapped on the hors d'oeuvre table until the hubbub quieted and dramatically declared to the unknowing and startled group, including the Russians, "A satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 km. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement...
...when the world was looking the other way to launch a roundup of dissidents opposed to his 44-year-long communist rule. Since March 18, 78 dissidents and journalists have been jailed, accused of treason for allegedly being financed by the U.S. One who has not been arrested is physicist Oswaldo Paya, 51, head of the Varela Project, which is calling for a constitutional referendum on free speech and elections. Paya's growing popularity may have triggered the dragnet, since most of those arrested are Varela activists. Paya himself, who last year won the E.U.'s Sakharov Award for human...
...morning, Iowa City's most famous resident steps into his 1986 Jeep Cherokee and drives two miles from his home to the University of Iowa campus. He enters Van Allen Hall, makes his way to his cluttered office, checks his e-mail and begins poring over data. At 88, physicist James Van Allen still revels in exposing the secrets of nature--45 years after making the first significant discovery of the space...
...with a resolution some 40 times as sharp as COBE's, WMAP has plenty to say. (The W was added last week in honor of David Wilkinson, the Princeton physicist who helped launch the project but died last summer.) "It's a lot like matching fingerprints," says Spergel. "We ran computer simulations based on many different values for all of the numbers, generated patterns for each and found the one that best matched what we actually...