Word: planck
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...quit, and others scattered. Gottingen did not remotely recover until after World War II, when it took in a wave of avid students in tattered Wehrmacht uniforms -"the best generation we ever had." recalls one veteran professor. It also welcomed a new source of research renown: the independent Max Planck Institute for Physics, named for the late pioneer of the quantum theory, and headed by Physicist Heisenberg, discoverer of the "uncertainty principle."* Though Heisenberg moved his staff to Munich in 1958, Göttingen remains headquarters of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science-a chain of Planck...
...always wanted to be a physicist, Niels Henrik David Bohr could have chosen no better age in which to live. By the time he was in college, physics was in fascinating chaos. Blow after blow had shattered its foundations: Albert Einstein proved that matter is energy, Max Planck proved that energy comes in indivisible packets he called quanta. Lord Rutherford proved that though the very name atom means "indivisible" in Greek, atoms are not indivisible. Nothing seemed certain. One physicist declared that all students should be warned: "Caution! Dangerous structure! Closed for reconstruction...
...Rutherford's laboratory at Manchester, England, just after Rutherford had advanced the theory that atoms are miniature solar systems with electrons revolving like planets around a sunlike nucleus. The idea had serious faults, which Bohr, then 27, spotted promptly; he corrected them by applying the unfamiliar principles of Planck's new quantum theory...
...chemists synthesize life? Not quite yet. But famed Biochemist Gerhard Schramm of the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research at Tubingen, Germany, is coming remarkably close. Last month he told a conference at Munich that he has managed with simple chemicals to build nucleic acid, the most vital compound in living organisms-and he used the same processes that are thought to have created the first life on earth...
...massive experiment conducted by Adolf Butenandt, 56, who was co-winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for isolating the male sex hormone, androsterone), a research team at Munich's Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry imported 1,000,000 silkworm cocoons from Italy and Japan, opened them up with razor blades, separated the pupae of 310,000 females from the males. What followed, in the words of one researcher, was "a mass slaughter, and not for the fainthearted." Each tiny pupa was disemboweled, the scent glands carefully cut out. Male moths served as lab assistants: when they were...