Word: william
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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During the 1960s and early '70s, three biologists--William Hamilton, George Williams and Robert Trivers--ushered in a new view of evolution that would complicate this story line. Among its messages: for a highly social species, it isn't just a jungle out there; it's a jungle in here. Society is deeply, if often inconspicuously, competitive. Evolution favored traits that helped our ancestors get more genes passed on than their neighbors got. People's brains are designed less to deal with lions than to deal with other people's brains...
Hubble's astronomical triumphs earned him worldwide scientific honors and made him the toast of Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s--the confidant of Aldous Huxley and a friend to Charlie Chaplin, Helen Hayes and William Randolph Hearst. Yet nobody (except perhaps Hubble) could have imagined such a future when the 23-year-old Oxford graduate began his first job, in New Albany...
...second work in progress that proposed to explore the origins and geological aspects of the sea. The material was rejected by 15 magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and National Geographic. Eventually the work came into the hands of Edith Oliver at the New Yorker, who recommended it to William Shawn, who recognized its exceptional quality at once. Much of it was serialized as "A Profile of the Sea," and in July 1951 the entire manuscript was published as The Sea Around Us. It won the John Burroughs Medal, then the National Book Award, and within the year sold more...
...transistor was born just before Christmas 1947 when John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, two scientists working for William Shockley at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., observed that when electrical signals were applied to contacts on a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input. Shockley was not present at that first observation. And though he fathered the discovery in the same way Einstein fathered the atom bomb, by advancing the idea and pointing the way, he felt left out of the momentous occasion...
...William Bradford Shockley was born in London, where his father, a mining engineer, and mother, a mineral surveyor, were on a business assignment. Home-schooled in Palo Alto, Calif., before attending Palo Alto Military Academy and Hollywood High School, he found his interest in physics sparked by a neighbor who taught the subject at Stanford University. Shockley earned a bachelor's degree from Caltech, and a Ph.D. at M.I.T. for a dissertation titled "Calculations of Wave Functions for Electrons in Sodium Chloride Crystals...