Word: einstein
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...most popular series of the past few years was the TIME 100, our list of the most influential people of the 20th century, culminating in Albert Einstein as Person of the Century. I oversaw the first installment, Leaders and Revolutionaries, and I still remember the heated debates about whether we should pick Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan (the Gipper won out) and whether Joseph Stalin should join the list with Adolf Hitler (he didn't make...
...Albert Einstein labored unsuccessfully for decades to create a theory that would merge relativity and quantum physics into one tidy mathematical package. But where Einstein failed, physicists may finally be on the verge of success, largely thanks to Edward Witten, generally considered the greatest theoretical physicist in the world. "Ed is unique," says John Schwarz, a theorist at Caltech, "the kind of person who comes along once a century...
...soft-spoken Witten, 52, didn't even set out to be a scientist. He majored in history at Brandeis and originally planned to be a journalist but ended up getting a Ph.D. in physics instead. By the mid-1980s, some of his colleagues had decided that the answer to Einstein's failed dream was to treat the building blocks of matter--quarks, photons, electrons and such--as minuscule, vibrating strings of energy rather than as particles. But superstring theory was considered no more than an esoteric and eccentric subspecialty until Witten (by this time a full professor at Princeton) turned...
What sort of contributions? Don't ask, unless twistor-space methods and Yang-Mills theories are your cup of tea. But if Witten's string theory is right, it means that the quest Einstein began to find the ultimate laws of the universe may nearly be over. The proof, however, may still be many years off. Witten once called string theory "a bit of 21st century physics that somehow dropped into the 20th century." If so, Witten clearly has the 21st century mind to handle it. --By Michael Lemonick
Initially, the discovery stopped many physicists in their tracks. Yes, Einstein had thought of this concept of “dark energy” first, but could it really be true? Einstein’s “cosmological constant” had been deemed unnecessary by scientists for decades. Now Kirshner and his team were trying to bring it back...