Word: buttings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Einstein could never accept that the universe was at its heart a cosmic crapshoot, so that today his papers on unified field theory seem hopelessly archaic. But the puzzle they tried to solve is utterly fundamental. In simply recognizing the problem, Einstein was so daringly far-sighted that only now...
Already, in fact, theoretical physicists have succeeded in constructing a framework that offers the best hope yet of integrating gravity with nature's other fundamental forces. This framework is popularly known as string theory because it postulates that the smallest, indivisible components of the universe are not point-like particles...
Over the years, enthusiasm for string theory has waxed and waned. It enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 1970s, but then most physicists stopped working on it. Theorist John Schwarz of Caltech and his colleague Joel Scherk of the Ecole Normale Superieure, however, persevered, and in 1974 their patience...
Nature rarely bestows gifts on scientists, however, without exacting a price, and the price, in this case, takes the form of additional complications. Among other things, string theory requires the existence of up to seven dimensions in addition to the by now familiar four (height, width, length and time). It...
But that, in fact, has turned out to be the case. In 1995, Witten, perhaps the most brilliant theorist working in physics today, declared that all five supersymmetric string theories represented different approximations of a deeper, underlying theory. He called it M theory. The insight electrified his colleagues and inspired...