Word: young
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...truth be told, rather weird at times. His own purification regime involved inordinate attention to the bowel movements of himself and those around him, and he liked testing his powers of self-denial by sleeping naked with young women. Nevertheless, he became not just a political force but a spiritual guide for those repelled by the hate and greed that polluted this century. "Generations to come," said Albert Einstein, "will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth...
Gandhi's life of civil disobedience began while he was a young lawyer in South Africa when, because he was a dark-skinned Indian, he was told to move to a third-class seat on a train even though he held a first-class ticket. He refused, and ended up spending the night on a desolate platform. It culminated in 1930, when he was 61, and he and his followers marched 240 miles in 24 days to make their own salt from the sea in defiance of British colonial laws and taxes. By the time he reached the sea, several...
...start with medicine. In 1928 the young Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming sloppily left a lab dish growing bacteria on a bench when he went on vacation. It got contaminated with a Penicillium mold spore, and when he returned, he noticed that the mold seemed to stop the growth of the germs. His serendipitous discovery would eventually save more lives than were lost in all the century's wars combined...
During his spare time as a young technical officer in a Swiss patent office in 1905, he produced three papers that changed science forever. The first, for which he was later to win the Nobel Prize, described how light could behave not only like a wave but also like a stream of particles, called quanta or photons. This wave-particle duality became the foundation of what is known as quantum physics. It also provided theoretical underpinnings for such 20th century advances as television, lasers and semiconductors...
...lonely struggle to unify gravity and electromagnetism in a single mathematical framework, he watched Germany's saber rattling with alarm. Despite his earlier pacifism, he spoke in favor of military action against Hitler. Without fanfare, he helped scores of Jewish refugees get into an unwelcoming U.S., including a young photographer named Philippe Halsman, who would take the most famous picture of him (reproduced on the cover of this issue...