Word: foams
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Replacing particles with strings eliminated at least one problem that had bedeviled scientists trying to meld general relativity and quantum mechanics. This difficulty arose because space lacks smoothness below subatomic scales. When distances become unimaginably small, space bubbles and churns frenetically, an effect sometimes referred to as quantum foam. Pointlike particles, including the graviton, are likely to be tossed about by quantum foam, like Lilliputian boats to which ripples in the ocean loom as large waves. Strings, by contrast, are miniature ocean liners whose greater size lets them span many waves at once, making them impervious to such disturbances...
Quantum physics demolishes the conventional concept of time in its own peculiar ways. Measured at short enough durations, space-time loses its apparently smooth, continuous structure, devolving into what Princeton physicist John Wheeler calls "quantum foam." The orderly flow of events may really be as much an illusion as the flickering frames of a movie. And according to independent physicist Barbour's new book, even the apparent sequence of the flickers is illusory...
...about the cover image. Photographer Greg Heisler and art director Arthur Hochstein came up with the idea of shooting our Person of the Year inside an Amazon shipping box, complete with plastic-foam chips. Not only was Bezos game but his cheerfulness never flagged even after he'd spent nearly an hour in cardboard. Bezos' gleeful reaction when he saw a Polaroid shot of the image that day: "This is really weird...
...design office, where Alicia and helpers make FM come to life. Our photographer, Matthew R. Cordell, finds the foam of the couch in here almost as tasty as beans...
...week before graduation, three high school friends and I journeyed down to Mexico for our first real yeehaw before we rode off into the sunset. Mostly fragments of the trip have stuck with me: the chorus of a song "you've got to lick it," the suffocating stench of foam, the cool slip and slide of my new black pants and a search mission one morning for my best friend. There were jet skis and tan lines...