Word: scientist
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DESCRIPTION: Highest known superconducting temperatures for various materials on a scale of absolute zero to over 100 Kelvin for the years 1911 to 1980, with illustration of scientist holding thermometer bounding up steps...
...University of Illinois, Physicist Donald Ginsberg raced out to buy an air mattress and an alarm clock, anticipating a spate of all-nighters. At IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, scientists successfully duplicated the compound, analyzed its crystal structure and passed the information on to the company's labs in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where their colleagues were able to make thin films of the substance literally overnight. At the University of California, Berkeley, a group that included Theoretical Physicist Marvin Cohen, who had been among those predicting superconductivity in the oxides two decades ago, reproduced...
...academics on a hunt for error." Last week the sheriff rode again. At the NAS annual meeting in its imposing marble headquarters in Washington, the normally stately proceedings were shattered by an acrimonious debate in which Lang led a successful drive to refuse membership to a distinguished Harvard political scientist: Samuel P. Huntington, director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and president of the American Political Science Association...
Beyond such charges, what really seemed at issue was a long-standing tension in U.S. academic circles between two groups -- physical, or "hard," scientists such as chemists, physicists and biologists, whose work traces cause-effect relationships and lends itself to mathematical proofs, and social, or "soft," scientists such as sociologists, psychologists and political scientists, whose work involves speculation about human motives and mixes subjective evaluation with fact. A political scientist, for example, cannot prove mathematically that Hitler's political regime was an inevitable consequence of Germany's post-World War I disarray, but he can make a pretty good case...
...Washington debates, Huntington drew some vehement support, particularly among the NAS's 177 social scientists, who have been admitted since membership criteria were widened 16 years ago to provide a broader social context for counsel to the Government. One social-scientist member said in a speech, "His work is quite impressive, and he is a very fine scholar and a good scientist." After the vote, Huntington defended equations in his writings as "simply a way of summing up a complicated argument." He added, "Good Lord, any good social scientist knows the things he studies are constantly changing, full of exceptions...