Word: planck
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...began to unlock the mysteries of the atom: Max Planck launched quantum physics by discovering that atoms emit bursts of radiation in packets. Also the mysteries of the mind: Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams that year. Marconi was preparing to send radio signals across the Atlantic, the Wright Brothers went to Kitty Hawk to work on their gliders, and an unpromising student named Albert Einstein finally graduated, after some difficulty, from college that year. So much for the boneheaded prediction made the year before by Charles Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office: "Everything that can be invented...
...reason general relativity broke down at the Big Bang was that it was not compatible with quantum theory, the other great conceptual revolution of the early 20th century. The first step toward quantum theory came in 1900, when Max Planck, working in Berlin, discovered that the radiation from a body that was glowing red hot could be explained if light came only in packets of a certain size, called quanta. It was as if radiation were packaged like sugar; you cannot buy an arbitrary amount of loose sugar in a supermarket but can only buy it in 1-lb. bags...
...Planck presents his quantum theory at a meeting of the German Physical Society in Berlin...
...first newspaper calling for revolution in Russia. Churchill, 25, was elected to the House of Commons. J.P. Morgan began working with a young executive named Charles Schwab to buy out Andrew Carnegie and conglomerate U.S. Steel, by far the biggest business in the world. And the German physicist Max Planck made one of the discoveries that would shape the century: that atoms emit radiations of energy in bursts he called quanta...
...ELECTRONIC CENTURY A defining event actually occurred three years before the century began: the discovery of the electron by British physicist J.J. Thomson. Along with Planck's 1900 theory of quantum physics, this discovery led to the first weapon of mass destruction, which helped hasten the end of the Second World War and became the defining reality of the cold war. Alan Turing harnessed electronics to devise the first digital computers. Five centuries earlier, Gutenberg's printing press had cut the cost of transmitting information by a factor of a thousand. That paved the way for the Reformation by allowing...