Build a quantum computer and problems long dismissed as hopeless would — George Johnson (writer)

"I shouldnt 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."

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

"George Johnsons Santa Fe office is packed floor to ceiling with century-old electrical paraphernalia — cathode-ray tubes, high-voltage spark coils, glass cylinders of hydrogen and helium, cascades of wires. Theyre the relics of an eBay odyssey he undertook to re-create a 1909 experiment by Robert Millikan measuring the charge on a single electron."

"What a chronicler can do, if not share the pain, is observe and ponder and explicate, and Johnson delivers. He busts myths and clarifies realities about what seems to cause, or to help prevent, cancer."

"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."