Word: physicists
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...many from Cornell, Caltech and M.I.T. They contend that Star Wars research is high-tech hocus-pocus that will escalate the arms race. Some scientists suggest that because the protest has been centered at elite universities, SDI research is being done at less prestigious places. Huffs Princeton's Nobel Physicist Philip Anderson: "People who are hungry and need funding are going to lap up the money. They're out there, people from East Podunk Univerity, while the first-raters are signing the pledge...
That is, perhaps, until now. These days physicists are astir with a concept that just may be their ultimate TOE. The theory, developed by Physicists John Schwarz of Caltech and Michael Green of Queen Mary College in London, is known by the unlikely name of superstrings. It explains the forces not as interacting pointlike particles--the conventional approach--but as infinitesimally small, winding, curling, one-dimensional strings. By manipulating the highly intricate mathematics of the string theory, physicists believe they can avoid many of the troubling discrepancies that have dogged all other TOEs. Some scientists are already comparing the idea...
...agree. Since the fall of 1984, scientific papers about superstrings have been streaming forth at an ever increasing rate that now averages 100 per month, and conferences centered around strings are becoming commonplace. Upon hearing of Schwarz and Green's latest breakthrough in string theory, says Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, "I dropped everything I was doing, including several books I was working on, and started learning everything I could about string theory." That task is far from trivial. "The mathematics," he concedes, "is very difficult...
...years to come, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein as well--that in a vacuum all objects, regardless of mass, fall at the same speed. Galileo's work went unchallenged until last week, when Purdue University Physics Professor Ephraim Fischbach, three of his graduate students and S.H. Aronson, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, reported discerning a previously unknown force that causes objects of different masses to fall at different rates...
...stakes could scarcely be higher. The toll of the 9/11 attacks would probably pale alongside a successful attack on a nuclear plant near a major metropolitan area. A recent study by Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, estimates that if terrorists triggered a meltdown at the Indian Point nuclear power plant, 35 miles north of New York City, as many as 44,000 people could die from radiation poisoning within a year, and as many as 518,000 could perish eventually from cancers spawned by the attack. Millions of people in the greater New York area...