Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...trouble is, neither Witten nor anyone else knows how many other pieces must fall into place before scientists succeed in solving this greatest of all puzzles. One major reason, observes Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, is that string theory developed backward. "In most theories, physicists first see an overarching idea and then put equations to it." In string theory, says Greene, "we're still trying to figure out the central nugget of truth...
...Schwarz of Caltech and his colleague Joel Scherk of the Ecole Normale Superieure, however, persevered, and in 1974 their patience was rewarded. For some time they had noticed that some of the vibrating strings spilling out of their equations didn't correspond to the particles they had expected. At first they viewed these mathematical apparitions as nuisances. Then they looked at them more closely; the ghosts that haunted their equations, they decided, were gravitons, the still hypothetical particles that are believed to carry the gravitational force...
Over the next decade, this situation could change. Hopes are running high that upcoming experiments at giant particle colliders in the U.S. and Europe will provide the first tantalizing glimpses of supersymmetry. More speculatively, these experiments could also detect the first subtle signs of additional dimensions...
...both have existed concurrently may account for the low status of teachers. In America it is not enough to be smart; one must compensate for one's intelligence by also showing the canniness and real-world power of the cowboy and the pioneer. Einstein did this. He was the first modern intellectual superstar, and he won his stardom in the only way that Americans could accept--by dint of intuitive, not scholarly, intelligence and by having his thought applied to practical things, such as rockets and atom bombs...
There is a connection, though, between European Romanticism, which came into being at the tail end of the 18th century, and the totalitarian credos that bloomed like sudden deadly plants in the first third of the 20th. Einstein did not promote the image of man at the center of the cosmos, controlling the stars by thought. But, quite by accident, he was that image. Merely by being, he corroborated the Romantic view that people were 10 feet tall, capable of knowing heaven, and, in the Byronic mode, of speaking directly to God. The logical consequence of such "thinking" was that...