Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...worn suit and bedroom slippers, the tall, perpetually bent-over man with shy eyes displayed a lion's boldness when defying the Kremlin. Mocking his own quixotic ways, he once dubbed himself Andrei the Blessed, an honorific that in Russian connotes a kind of holy innocence. Said computer scientist Valentin Turchin, a fellow dissident who emigrated to the U.S.: "There are two categories of people who have left their imprint on humanity: leaders and saints. Sakharov was in the category of saints." One mournful colleague in Moscow summoned up a more scientific metaphor. "We've lost our moral compass...
Sakharov emerged from the most improbable of backgrounds as a human rights activist and peace advocate. In the 1940s and 1950s, he lived under security wraps as the Soviet Union's top nuclear scientist, cut off from all normal social contacts and followed at all times by a bodyguard. A theoretical physicist ranking with America's J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, he was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After he helped develop the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, he became one of the country's most decorated...
...feeling of personal responsibility, reinforced by the part I'd played in the development of the hydrogen bomb, the special knowledge I'd gained about thermonuclear warfare, my bitter struggle to ban nuclear testing and my familiarity with the Soviet system. My reading and discussions with a fellow scientist had acquainted me with the notions of an open society, convergence and world government. I hoped that these notions might ease the tragic crisis of our age. In 1968 I took my decisive step by publishing Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. The book rejected all extremes, the intransigence...
...scientist believes lack of computing power -- as well as ignorance about such critical factors as the interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere, and the impact of clouds on surface temperatures -- limits the ability to predict the greenhouse effect. "It's possible that Washington will see 96 days of temperatures over 100 degrees F in the year 2010," he says, "but it's also possible that the U.S. will be economically impoverished because it unilaterally imposed draconian measures in anticipation of a greenhouse warming that never arrived...
...part of economic advance. Senator Albert Gore, a Tennessee Democrat, advocates that assistance be refocused on "leapfrogging" technologies, like low-emission power plants, so that nations may better the lives of their people without repeating the mistakes of the industrial world. But to develop better technologies, says Harvard atmospheric scientist Michael McElroy, the U.S. will have to bolster its faltering science education...