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John A. Wheeler, a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, died Sunday morning at his home in Hightstown, N.J. He was 96. Skip to next paragraph The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Alison Wheeler Lahnston. Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms....

Without funding, lab space will be lostThe Seattle scientist who wants to test a controversial prediction from quantum theory that says light particles can go backward in time is, himself, running out of time. It's not a wormhole or warp in the space-time continuum. The problem is more mundane -- a black hole in the time-and-money continuum spawned by today's increasingly risk-averse, "performance-based" approach to funding research. "I guess you could say we're now living on borrowed time," wryly joked John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington. "All we need to keep going is maybe $20,000, but nobody...

Mysterious Death of Iranian Nuclear Physicist Esfandiar Saffari - 2007.02.08 Despite initial denials by Iran’s state-run media, Baztab news website [affiliated with former Passdaran Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezai] confirmed the “mysterious” death of Ardeshir Hosseinpour, a senior nuclear physicist involved in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Baztab quoted “one of Hosseinpour’s acquaintances” as saying, “Unfortunately, 20 days ago, Dr. Ardeshir Hosseinpour, who was only 40 years old and a medal-holder in Kung Fu, passed away in a house belonging to a professor at Shiraz University.” Baztab did not reveal further more details about the death, but confirmed that Dr....

Prof. Yuval Ne'eman, 80, a world-acclaimed physicist, multi-talented academic, one of Israel's most prominent scientists and a right-wing ideologue, died on Wednesday at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center after suffering a stroke. Born in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1925, he was not only the initiator of the Science and Technology Ministry and twice minister but also the founder and chairman of the Israel Space Agency. His coffin is to be on view in the courtyard of the Tel Aviv University Senate Building on Thursday from noon, and a funeral ceremony will begin at 1 p.m. in the presence of...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Philip Morrison, one of the inventors of the atomic bomb and an early leader in the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, has died. He was 89. Morrison, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died in his sleep at his home Friday, the university announced Monday. "Phil was a great physicist," said Marc Kastner, chairman of the physics department at MIT. "He was spectacular at explaining physics to the public, too." Morrison was the host of "The Ring of Truth," a six-part series aired by PBS, and a book review editor for...

President Bush on Friday picked physicist Michael Griffin to lead NASA as it prepares to resume space shuttle flights and tries to meet the White House goal of sending astronauts back to the moon in the decade ahead. If confirmed by the Senate, Griffin would become the space agency's 11th administrator. Members of Congress immediately praised the president's choice, as did John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's space policy institute. "I've known Mike for a long time and have a great deal of respect for him as a kind of innovative thinker, real enthusiast full of energy," Logsdon said....

Physicist Is Awarded the Templeton Prize in Spiritual Matters By DENNIS OVERBYE Published: March 10, 2005 Dr. Charles Townes, a physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for helping to invent the laser, added another and most unusual prize to a lifelong storehouse of honors yesterday. In a news conference at the United Nations, he was announced as the winner of the $1.5 million Templeton Prize, awarded annually for progress or research in spiritual matters. Dr. Townes, 89, a longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has long argued that those old antagonists science and religion are more alike than...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Hans Bethe, one of the last of the giants of 20th century physics, who played a pivotal role in designing the first atomic bomb and won a Nobel Prize for figuring out how the sun and other stars generate energy, has died at the age of 98. Bethe died Sunday at his home, Cornell University announced Monday. During World War II, he was a key figure in the building of the first atomic bomb as head of the Manhattan Project's theoretical physics division at Los Alamos, N.M. Bethe (BAY'-tuh), who fled Nazi Germany and joined the Cornell...

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Nuclear physicist D. Allan Bromley, a Yale University professor and an architect of U.S. science policy during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, has died. He was 79. Bromley died of a heart attack Thursday afternoon, shortly after teaching a class, the university said. As then-President Bush (news - web sites)'s top science adviser from 1989 to 1993, Bromley pushed for sizable increases in funding for scientific research in a race to keep U.S. manufacturing ahead of Japan and Germany. "My respect for the job he did as science adviser to the president knew no...

BEIJING (Reuters) - An 82-year-old Chinese Nobel physicist has popped the question to a 28-year-old student whom he described as his last gift from God, the Beijing Morning Post said on Friday.   Dr. Chen Ning Yang, known in China as Yang Zhenning, would marry student Wong Fan in January, the paper said. Yang won the physics Nobel Prize in 1957 jointly with Lee Tsung-dao for their investigation of the so-called parity laws, which led to important discoveries about elementary particles. Yang, whose wife died last year, is a professor at Tsinghua University. He and his wife met Wong in...

German physicist disputes Atlantis discovery claim by American Tue Nov 16, 3:00 PM ET Science - AFP BERLIN (AFP) - The remains of the lost city of Atlantis which a United States researcher claims to have found off the Mediterranean island of Cyprus are in fact submarine volcanoes, according to a German physicist. US researcher Robert Sarmast claimed Sunday to have found proof that the mythical lost city of Atlantis actually existed and is located under the Mediterranean seabed between Cyprus and Syria. But German physicist Christian Huebscher said he had identified the phenomenon as 100,000 year-old volcanoes that spewed...

Director accused of overreacting A Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist charged Friday that "national security has suffered demonstrably" and the nuclear weapons lab's reputation has been unjustly maligned because of director George "Pete" Nanos' decision in July to suspend work at the lab while cracking down on safety problems. The physicist, 32-year lab veteran Brad Lee Holian, has submitted a 1,500- word article outlining his charges to the journal Physics Today. The article has not yet been accepted for publication. Holian works in the T-12 division of the University of California-run lab in New Mexico. Contrary to Nanos' harsh public...

LONDON (Reuters) - Police are investigating a series of alleged mysterious assaults on disabled top scientist Stephen Hawking, the Daily Mirror has reported. The paper said on Monday detectives wanted to question Hawking, a Cambridge University professor and author of the best selling "A Brief History of Time", about a number of minor injuries he had recently suffered. "The family are worried sick. They've been suspicious for some time that someone has been harming Stephen," an unnamed source told the paper. A spokesman for Cambridgeshire police said he could neither confirm or deny the Mirror story. The world famous...

<p>Edward Teller, the man who played a key role in U.S. defense and energy policies for more than half a century and was dubbed the "Father of the H-bomb" for his enthusiastic pursuit of the powerful weapon, died Tuesday, a spokesman for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory confirmed. He was 95.</p>

I received an email early this morning from a stranger.........a stranger who sought me out to tell me that an old high school buddy had died, quite suddenly, of a heart attack. No, he wasn't famous. His name was Bruce Parker. We went to high school together in the early '70's in Huntsville, Alabama. Being close to the Tennessee border, a few of us would often get together and drive across the border to some little bar or liquor store (the drinking age was 18 in Tennessee in those days; you know, before Uncle Sugar blackmailed everyone into raising it...

Former Security Chief Of El Al Airlines Says New Technology Will 'Revolutionize Aviation Security' IRVINE, Calif., Sept. 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Few people have heard of HiEnergy Technologies, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: HIET) of Irvine, California, but the company's Founder, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Dr. Bogdan Maglich, has been a key player in global scientific circles for half a century. Soon, both he and his latest discovery will make HiEnergy a dominant player in the high stakes aviation security market, a market that industry research predicts will experience compound annual growth of 47 percent, from $600-million in 2002 to $8-billion by...

May 12, 2002 He's Still Ready for His Close-Up By DENNIS OVERBYE [A] LBERT EINSTEIN, so the story goes, was playing the violin with a bunch of friends in a chamber group one afternoon, and it wasn't going well. Finally, after several false starts, the conductor turned to him scowling and asked: "Einstein! Can't you count?" It's my favorite Einstein story, simply because I have heard it so many times, invariably recounted by a friend or relative of someone who was there, that I have had to conclude either that conductors bawled him out about once a month, or that...