Word: physicists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...cold Chicago day in the late 1990s, physicist David Grier was fiddling around in his laboratory with a cheap piece of plastic and a laser. Grier and a graduate student named Eric Dufresne were trying to build a new kind of "optical trap" - a device that splits a laser beam and uses it to capture particles of a single substance. Multiple traps, used in tandem, could let the scientists play traffic cop on a molecular level, separating a substance into component parts - removing bacteria from blood, for example. But first they had to make it work. For a year, Grier...
Take black holes. In the 1960s, Princeton physicist John Wheeler coined the term to describe a region where matter is so dense and gravity so intense that even light can't escape. At the core of a black hole is a singularity, a spot where density and gravity appear to become infinitely great-- unleashing forces that could rip a hole in the very fabric of space-time and send a brand-new universe expanding in a direction undetectable and imperceptible to us. Since giant black holes lurk at the cores of many billions of galaxies and smaller holes are left...
...explanation of last resort. When he first began looking at it back in the late 1980s, particle theorist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas hoped the anthropic principle might go away. But the opposite happened. "It's not something that we're particularly happy about," he says. Every physicist dreams of being able to calculate everything from a set of fundamental laws. But at the same time, Weinberg says, "it's important to be realistic. We may just have to get used to the fact that some of the things we call fundamental constants may be historical accidents...
...that the change in the earth's axis - and the repositioning of the North Pole - brought about its cataclysmic end. Refreshingly undogmatic for an Atlantis hunter, he is quoted as saying: "I don't have any concrete scientific proof for my theory. But I believe in it." JUNE German physicist Rainer Kühne argued - based on satellite images that he says show ancient ruins - that Atlantis lies under what are now salt marshes near the southern Spanish city of Cádiz. SEPTEMBER Swedish geographer Ulf Erlingsson argued in a new book that Atlantis is in fact Ireland...
...rrenmatt’s darkly comic tale of love, murder, identity and physics sparkles with absurdist charm thanks in large part to the production’s cast, which is stellar: each and every one. Alan D. Zackheim ’06 is somber and compelling as the solitary physicist-on-a-mission Johann Mobius, and his single-mindedly devoted yet star-crossed love interest Nurse Monika (Erica R. Lipez ’05) transcends the surreal and silly qualities of her character to turn in an occasionally poignant performance...