Word: gravitons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...French deconstructionism, Ehrenreich went scrounging for morsels of social insight in chic restaurants, living rooms, corporate offices, Playboy magazines and even a make-believe White House Situation Room. She returns laughing -- at Ronald Reagan; at the American medical system, which would rather produce a "temple-sized ultraquark-powered graviton for the visualization of intestinal gas" than put up with sick people; and at the "unbearable being of whiteness," which led presidential candidate Richard Gephardt to tell "moving stories about his youth as a poor black boy in the South, and how he had inexplicably turned white, clear...