Word: scientist
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Forced to concoct a drama, Glashow chooses as his story the constant intersections of theory and observation that led to the currently held beliefs about the structure of the atom. Just as in The Double Helix, another popular scientific work about an abstract theory, the scientist's own life takes on great importance. Interactions goes beyond simply imparting Glashow's knowledge of elementary particle physics (the realm of quarks, strangeness, charm and color)in an effort to present what he terms a "scientific autobiography...
Employing a technique called distributed processing, Arjen Lenstra, a Dutch-born computer scientist working as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, broke the task into smaller pieces and dispatched them over ordinary phone lines to computers at universities and corporations. The results were then compiled by minicomputers at a Digital Equipment lab in Palo Alto, Calif. The success of the ad hoc network, one of the largest ever assembled, raises problems for cryptographers and intelligence agencies, whose code solutions are often based on the prime factors of long, hard-to-solve integers. But it certainly demonstrates the enormous...
ROBERT Wright, now senior editor at The New Republic, appropriately begins his "search for meaning" by taking us on a journey: to the private Caribbean island of multimillionaire computer scientist Edward Fredkin (rumored to be the model for the pessimistic and reclusive computer guru in the movie, War Games...
WRIGHT'S journey through the role of information in cosmology, sociobiology and systems theory teaches us also about the joys and pains of being a scientist, particularly one with his own personal ideas about how the world works. Sometimes, all three seem to share the frustration of Ed Fredkin, who tells the author, "I feel like I'm the only person with eyes in a world that's blind...
...Soviet Union has begun a generation-long program to explore Mars that is expected to end with cosmonauts landing on the Red Planet, so prominent in the sky these nights, soon after the turn of the century. A Soviet scientist has announced that an automated roving vehicle will land there in 1994; one of its jobs will be to look for fossils. Fossils on Mars...