Word: reactionism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Initial heating of the phenol and formaldehyde (in the presence of an acid or base to get the reaction going) produced a shellac-like liquid good for coating surfaces like a varnish. Further heating turned the liquid into a pasty, gummier goo. And when Baekeland put this stuff into the bakelizer, he was rewarded with a hard, translucent, infinitely moldable substance. In a word: plastic...
...Clark, Goddard tried to figure out just how. Fooling around with the arithmetic of propulsion, he calculated the energy-to-weight ratio of various fuels. Fooling around with airtight chambers, he found that a rocket could indeed fly in a vacuum, thanks to Newton's laws of action and reaction. Fooling around with basic chemistry, he learned, most important, that if he hoped to launch a missile very far, he could never do it with the poor black powder that had long been the stuff of rocketry. Instead, he would need something with real propulsive oomph--a liquid like kerosene...
Piaget was not an educator and never enunciated rules about how to intervene in such situations. But his work strongly suggests that the automatic reaction of putting the child right may well be abusive. Practicing the art of making theories may be more valuable for children than achieving meteorological orthodoxy; and if their theories are always greeted by "Nice try, but this is how it really is..." they might give up after a while on making theories. As Piaget put it, "Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach...
...bomb squad. In 1939, still officially enemy aliens, Fermi and Szilard co-invented the nuclear reactor at Columbia University, sketching out a three-dimensional lattice of uranium slugs dropped into holes in black, greasy blocks of graphite moderator, with sliding neutron-absorbing cadmium control rods to regulate the chain reaction. Fermi, still mastering English, dubbed this elegantly simple machine a "pile...
...estimates he had charted with his pocket slide rule. At 11:30 a.m., as was his custom, he stopped for lunch. The pile went critical in midafternoon with the full withdrawal of the control rods, and Fermi allowed himself a grin. He had proved the science of a chain reaction in uranium; from then on, building a bomb was mere engineering. He shut the pile down after 28 minutes of operation. Wigner had thought to buy a celebratory fiasco of Chianti, which supplied a toast. "For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant," Wigner...