Word: questioner
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Alan Turing had done was answer, in the negative, a vexing question in the arcane realm of mathematical logic, few nonspecialists today would have any reason to remember him. But the method Turing used to show that certain propositions in a closed logical system cannot be proved within that system--a corollary to the proof that made Kurt Godel famous--had enormous consequences in the world at large. For what this eccentric young Cambridge don did was to dream up an imaginary machine--a fairly simple typewriter-like contraption capable somehow of scanning, or reading, instructions encoded on a tape...
...British reserve. They capped a dry account of DNA's structure with one of the most famous understatements in the history of science: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." They faced the question of byline: Watson and Crick, or Crick and Watson? They flipped a coin...
...predict what lies ahead, we must often rely on guesswork. But the nature of our present ignorance points to problems science cannot avoid. The most obvious of these is the question of what happens in our head when we are thinking. Nobody yet has a compelling answer for that. People surmise, but no surmise can yet meet the tyrannical test that every assertion about the nature of the world must be proved by experiment or observation...
...life began is a grander question that will occupy most of the next century. The first task is to reconstruct the history of evolution over the past 4 billion years. Modern gene technology can use the DNA in every living thing as a vast repository of historical information. Even dna will not point all the way back to the beginning of life, but it will provide clues to the self-replicating entities first assembled from simple chemicals on the primeval earth. The century ahead will see the first laboratory proof that self-replicating systems can form from ordinary chemicals. Determining...
...that. All previous centuries have been justly proud of their achievements, yet those have been found, in retrospect, to be deficient. We must learn to be patient. We should also discard the idea that scientific inquiry will ever be complete. What we know so far is that each question answered merely spawns another. Why should it not be like that for the rest of time...