Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dante II is the brainchild of Bares and William ("Red") Whittaker, the principal research scientist at Carnegie Mellon's robotics lab and a legend among robot designers. Whittaker helped design the machine that cleaned up the Three Mile Island reactor after its near meltdown in 1979, and he oversaw development of a system that will automatically inspect the heat-resistant tiles on NASA's space shuttles...
...Berg traveled widely, lived well and managed to be where trouble wasn't. In 1944 he was at a conference in peaceful Switzerland to hear a lecture by Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel prizewinning physicist who headed Hitler's atom-bomb project. Berg's orders were to shoot the scientist if it became apparent that the Nazis were close to producing a nuclear weapon. Berg did not know enough physics or German to be sure whether or not he should shoot, and he didn't. The genius who formulated the uncertainty principle proved to be an incompetent administrator, so his continued...
...from the orbiting Hubble telescope. Finally, at about 8, the first pictures came up on the video screen -- and there, right at Jupiter's edge, was a bright splotch of light. "Somebody tell me that isn't one of Jupiter's moons," said an anxious Heidi Hammel, a planetary scientist from M.I.T...
...answers were less than reassuring. NASA Director James Webb was not certain we could beat the Soviets to the moon. Chief NASA scientist Hugh Dryden thought it might take a program like the atom bomb's Manhattan Project and cost $40 billion. (The entire federal budget was then $98 billion.) Budget Director David Elliott Bell asked where the money would come from. Staff aide Ted Sorensen brought up the financial needs of earthly social programs. Science adviser Jerome Wiesner, sucking on a cold pipe, wasn't sure a manned lunar landing made good scientific sense...
...mirabile visu, "Speed" is not Ted on a bus. Reeves' character Jack Trevens is tough and somehow intense. The movie doesn't try to make him out to be a rocket scientist--his partner Harry (Jeff Daniels) provides the technical smarts, constantly telling Travens the why and wherefore of the bombs they encounter. But Travens is believably street-smart, able to think on his feet...