Word: m
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. DESMOND LLEWELYN, 85, British actor who played the beleaguered gadget inventor Q in 17 James Bond films; in a car accident; in Firle, England. "In real life I'm allergic to gadgets," Llewelyn said. "They just don't work for me, not even those plastic cards for hotel-room doors...
DIED. HANK SNOW, 85, country music's rhinestone-studded Singing Ranger, whose 1950 hit I'm Movin' On was recorded in 36 languages; in Madison, Tenn. A regular at the Grand Ole Opry for nearly 50 years, Snow recorded more than 80 albums and in 1979 made the Country Music Hall of Fame...
...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 a flurry of productive activity that has now convinced many that string theory is, in fact, on the right track. "It smells right and it feels right," declares Caltech's Kip Thorne, an expert on black holes and general relativity. "At this early stage in the development of a theory...
...M in M theory stands for many things, says Witten, including matrix, mystery and magic. But now he has added murky to the list. Why? Not even Witten, it turns out, has been able to write down the full set of mathematical equations that describe exactly what M theory is, for it has added still more layers of complexity to an already enormous problem. Witten appears reconciled to the possibility that decades may pass before M matures into a theory with real predictive power. "It's like when you're hiking in the mountains," he muses, "and occasionally you reach...
Einstein was brilliant, of course, but he was also lucky. When he developed the general theory of relativity, he dealt with a world that had just three spatial dimensions plus time. As a result, he could use off-the-shelf mathematics to develop and solve his equations. M theorists can't: their science resides in an 11-dimensional world that is filled with weird objects called branes. Strings, in this nomenclature, are one-dimensional branes; membranes are two-dimensional branes. But there are also higher-dimensional branes that no one, including Witten, quite knows how to deal with. For these...