Even if you invoke vast geologic time, the series of fortuitous mutations leading to an eye, a kidney, or a brain seem too good to be true. - George Johnson

Build a quantum computer and problems long dismissed as hopeless would melt away. Imagine tapping a fundamental force of nature, not for the purpose of moving around matter but for moving around numbers—explosions of information. Quantum computing would be to ordinary computing what nuclear energy is to fire.

While Robert Welch opposed the United Nations for supposedly encouraging obeisance to the one-world conspiracy, McIntire's fundamentalists saw it as a "house of red Babel."

I shouldn't be fooled, some of his old colleagues told me, by the newer, mellower Murray. As I explored his past, I found that his reputation as an intellectual show-off was well earned. He had long been interested in almost everything—classical history, archaeology, linguistics, wildlife ecology, ornithology, numismatics, French and Chinese cuisine—and he was always ready to lure people into conversations where he could display the depth of his knowledge and, it sometimes seemed, the shallowness of their own. The breadth of his learning had become legendary.