Word: plancks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...