Word: scientistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Today, Dr. Teller is the bete noir of the younger generation of scientists. To them he is almost mythical-the mad scientist Dr. Strangelove who wants to build more and more "beautiful" weapons for the sheer, fantastic delight of controlling Dooms-day. Teller charged into the arena to meet these young critics during a day-long visit on December 27 to the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. Many times in his past, such confrontations have won Teller only unpopularity-even ostracism. But this time, the old bull...
...only use of the bomb. "I fully and heartily agreed," Dr. Teller said. "Unfortunately, I did what I thought was supposed to do. I took the piece of document to the director of the laboratory (the late Dr. Oppenheimer), who told me, 'Szilard is using his influence as a scientist to influence political decisions. This is wrong. Don't you sign it. Don't circulate it.' I made the greatest mistake of feeling relieved of my responsibility-the most beautiful opportunity was missed. We could have proved that science could end a war without killing a single individual. Instead...
...airplane. "The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force can be united in a practical [flying] machine seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be," one scientist wrote about the turn of the century. One week before the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk, the New York Times editorially advised Samuel Langley, one of the Wright brothers' chief competitors, to turn his talents to ''more useful employment...
Such naysaying led Arthur Clarke, the science and science-fiction writer, to lay down what he calls Clarke's Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Most erroneous predictions, Clarke believes, stem from one of two causes: a failure of imagination or a failure of nerve. His law holds up in science, at least, where knowledge seems almost a barrier to drawing an accurate picture of the future. Far better as prophets have been the science-fiction...
...Social scientist...