Word: silicones
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...century had its share of great thinkers. Einstein, most notably, was the greatest theorist since Newton, whose universe he overthrew. Einstein's ideas led to making the 20th a century of physics, one marked by manipulations of subatomic particles in ways that produced everything from atom bombs to silicon chips...
...fibers in an Oriental rug. To everyone's astonishment, the gifted young man from Grinnell, Iowa--a minister's son--achieved that goal in a decade. His integrated circuit, or microchip, not only helped rename an orchard-filled California valley but also led to a seemingly endless harvest of silicon devices, from PCs to coffeemakers...
...Fairchild, Noyce used a new chemical etching method not only to print transistors on silicon wafers but also to lay down tracks between them. Besides eliminating expensive wiring, the new integrated circuits operated much faster. Six months earlier Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby had produced a similar chip, but it was made of germanium, required external wires and was tougher to manufacture. Noyce's chip won the ensuing patent race, but the two friendly rivals were content to regard themselves as co-inventors...
This is the century that split the atom, probed the psyche, spliced genes and cloned a sheep. It invented plastic, radar and the silicon chip. It built airplanes, rockets, satellites, televisions, computers and atom bombs. It overthrew our inherited ideas about logic, language, learning, mathematics, economics and even space and time. And behind each of these great ideas, great discoveries and great inventions is, in most cases, one extraordinary human mind...
Today plastic is nearly everywhere, from the fillings in our teeth to the chips in our computers (researchers are developing flexible transistors made of plastic instead of silicon so they can make marvels such as a flat-panel television screen that will roll like a scroll up your living-room wall). Plastic may not be as vilified now as it was in 1967, but it's still a stuff that people love and hate. Every time a grocery clerk asks, "Paper or plastic?," the great debate between old and new, natural and synthetic, biodegradable and not, silently unfolds...