Word: physicists
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Crick, who had actually begun his career as a physicist, remained ever the scientist, first investigating the workings of the living cell, turning next to a decade-long study of developmental biology and finally, in 1976, moving to California. There, he joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where for most of the past 17 years he has been involved in a study of the brain, specializing in the visual system because "I want to know how we see something." To requests for interviews or appearances, he politely replied by cards listing multiple choices ("Dr. Crick does not give interviews...
...that Hitler's Germany would produce the weapon first. Experts in the U.S. thought German science could have a lead in the race because a German chemist, Otto Hahn, had discovered nuclear fission in 1938. His countryman Werner Heisenberg was considered by many to be the world's leading physicist and was certain to be at the center of any Nazi A-bomb effort...
Another area where computerized worlds seem to mimic the real one is economics. J. Doyne Farmer, a physicist formerly at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been struck by how the mathematics of complexity seems to explain the workings of the stock market, which, like a biological system, involves constant adaptation to change by individual participants. After playing with computer models, Farmer decided it was time for a reality test of the theory. He and several partners founded Prediction Co., an Albuquerque, New Mexico, investment firm that uses math to try to beat the financial markets. Says Farmer...
Even if Farmer gets rich, there will be skeptics who dismiss the idea that complexity is the scientific revolution its proponents claim. The critics, writes physicist and sometime Santa Fe Institute visitor Daniel Stein in the December issue of Physics Today, can rightly ask, "Why is it necessary to force ((these phenomena)) under a single umbrella?" Yet there can be no doubt that investigations of complexity and chaos have at least made things more interesting. Comments Rockefeller University physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum: "Now we see things we didn't notice before, and we ask questions we didn't know...
MUCH OF MONDO 2000 STRAINS CREDIBILITY. Does physicist Nick Herbert really believe there might be a way to build TIME MACHINES? Did the CRYONICS experts at TransTime Laboratory really chill a family pet named Miles and then, after its near death experience, turn it back into what its owner describes as a "fully functional dog"? Are we expected to accept on faith that a SMART DRUG called centrophenoxine is an "intelligence booster" that provides "effective anti-aging therapy," or that another compound called hydergine increases mental abilities and prevents damage to brain cells? "All of this has some basis...