Explorers

Chuck Yeager made history in 1947 as the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. But even before he broke the sound barrier, Yeager's exploits had made him a legend among his fellow flyers. Shot down over occupied France during World War II, the wounded flyer successfully evaded capture and crossed the Pyrenees into neutral Spain, before returning to his squadron in England. Returning to the skies, he shot down five German planes in a single day, an extraordinary achievement in aerial warfare. After the war, Yeager broke speed records again and again, testing new planes for the Air Force. In 1947 he broke the sound barrier in the rocket-powered X-1 research plane. He served in both Korea and Vietnam, and helped train the first generation of U.S. astronauts. Along the way, he survived an incredible series of harrowing accidents and rose to the rank of General in the U.S. Air Force. The bestselling book and hit movie The Right Stuff, and his own best-selling autobiography, Yeager, brought him international fame, but his courage and resourcefulness had already assured his place in the history of aviation. In this address to the Academy of Achievement, recorded at the Academy's 1983 gathering in Coronado, California, General Yeager recalls how he joined the Army Air Force straight out of high school in West Virginia. He recalls his experiences as a test pilot, discusses continuing advances in aviation technology, and shares with the Academy's student delegates the sustaining life lessons he learned in air combat.

Robert S. Mulliken (June 7, 1896 - October 31, 1986) was an American physicist and chemist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1966. He was a distinguished member of the faculty at the University of Chicago for 55 years. Mulliken was primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory (the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules). His father was Samuel Mulliken, a professor of organic chemistry at MIT. He graduated from high school in 1913 and received the same scholarship to MIT that his father had won. After graduation from MIT in 1917, he was drafted into the Army during World War I. After the war, he entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago and studied under Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert A. Millikan, which exposed him to the old quantum theory. He then went to Harvard and was able to associate with many future luminaries, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and Harold C. Urey. In 1925 and 1927, Mulliken traveled to Europe and worked with quantum theorists Paul A. M. Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Born, and Friedrich Hund, who were developing the new quantum mechanics that would eventually supersede the old quantum theory. In 1927, Mulliken worked with Hund and developed a molecular orbital theory, now referred to as the Hund-Mulliken theory. He returned to the University of Chicago and was promoted to full professor of physics and chemistry in 1931. Robert Mulliken became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1936, the youngest member in the organization's history, at that time. Professor Mulliken participated in the 1983 Achievement Summit in Coronado, California and spoke to the student delegates about the joy of scientific research.

Leon Lederman is the world's foremost experimental physicist, one of the very small group of thinkers who revolutionized our understanding of the subatomic world. In the late 1950s and early '60s, he participated in the discovery of the K-meson particle and the non-conservation of parity during muon decay. In 1962, with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, he designed and performed an experiment that proved the existence of the muon neutrino. The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Lederman and his partners for "transforming the ghostly neutrino into an active tool of research." As Director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois Lederman led the efforts which found the first anti-matter particle in 1965 and the bottom quark in 1977. He laid the groundwork for discovery of the mysterious top quark, detected by researchers at Fermi Lab in 1994. In addition to his scientific works, Leon Lederman has written highly accessible works for the general reader, such as The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? in which he described the elusive particle, now known as "Higg's boson," which physicists believe endows objects with mass. He discusses this, and many other questions in his 2011 book, Quantum Physics for Poets. This podcast was recorded during his address to the Academy of Achievement at the Academy's 1982 Summit in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Marvin Lee Minsky is the co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Minsky is heralded as the "Father of Artificial Intelligence." He earned his degree in mathematics at Harvard in 1950 and his doctorate from Princeton in 1954. Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display, and the confocal microscope (a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope), and the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC. In the early 1970s, Minsky and Seymour Papert developed what came to be called The Society of Mind theory, which explained how intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky is one of the most influential leaders in the computer science community, where for fifty years, he has attempted to unveil the exciting real promise of artificial intelligence to extend mankind's intellect further than was ever dreamed. In the early 1980s, The New York Times described him as a Twentieth-Century Renaissance Man. Marvin Minsky participated in the 1982 Achievement Summit at New Orleans, and spoke to the student delegates about the new computer revolution and his philosophy of "life as a fact-finding mission."

J. Desmond Clark (1916 - 2002) was a British-born archeologist famed for his explorations of prehistoric Africa. Clark graduated form Cambridge University in the 1937 and worked as a curator of the Livingstone Museum in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) until the outbreak of World War II. During wartime military service, he carried out his first archeological fieldwork in the Horn of Africa. He earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge after the war and returned to Africa to direct the Livingstone Museum and undertook his first excavation on the southern edge of Lake Tanganyika. This site has become one of the most important archeological sites, where 250,000 years of human and history are preserved. In 1961, Clark accepted an appointment as Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he built one of the world's foremost centers of paleoanthropology. Professor Clark made international news in 1981, when he unearthed the skull and thigh fragments of a hominid that lived four million years ago, half a million years older than the famed Lucy skeleton, the oldest previously known human ancestor. The creature Clark unearthed walked upright, but had a brain no larger than that of the modern chimpanzee. Professor Clark retired from teaching in 1986, but continued working until his death, leading an expedition in China as late as 1991. Over the course of his career he published more than 300 scholarly articles and over 20 books. In this podcast, recorded at the 1982 Achievement Summit in New Orleans, Dr. Clark tells the Academy's student delegates about the joys and rewards of life in science. He discusses his work as an archaeologist, his expeditions in Africa, his passion for understanding human origins, and the role of teamwork in a scientific enterprise.

The astronomer Harlan Smith Ph.D. (1924 - 1991), longtime Director of the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas, was distinguished for his discovery of the optical variability of small, quasi-stellar objects, and for his efforts to share the wonders of the cosmos with the general public. Smith was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. An outstanding student with a passion for astronomy, he was runner-up in the first Westinghouse National Science Talent Search. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, he enrolled at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in astronomy. In 1953 he joined the astronomy faculty of Yale University. He moved to the University of Texas in 1963 to direct the McDonald Observatory and chair the University's astronomy department. He oversaw a great expansion of the department, acquiring a massive 2.7-meter telescope, known today as the Harlan Smith Telescope, for the Observatory. In the 1980s, Smith devoted much of his energy to designing a 7.6-meter telescope, nicknamed the Eye of Texas, which would have been the world's largest. The collapse of the Texas economy in 1985 brought an end to this project, but Smith's research contributed to the development of a super-telescope in Japan, and finally to the completion of an even larger (8.5-meter) Spectroscopic Survey Scope at McDonald. In this audio podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1981 Summit in Dallas, Texas, Dr. Smith discusses his efforts to build large telescopes and their importance to our understanding of the universe.