Word: stringing
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Judging by the flurry of activity in the field, others apparently 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...
...ultimate Theory of Everything. But the enhanced theory initially failed to cause a stir. "No one ever accused us being crackpots," says Schwarz, "but our work was ignored." In 1979 Schwarz began working with Michael Green, and by 1984 the two were able to demonstrate on paper that their string theory was free of anomalies besetting other unified theories that included gravity. That proof finally caught the attention of other physicists. Until then, says Witten, "it was still plausible that this was just a beautiful mathematical construction with nothing to do with the real world...
Although even physicists still have difficulty understanding the theory, superstrings may be thought of as one-dimensional bits of energy measuring a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a centimeter in length. Depending on different versions of the theories, these strings may be either open, or closed into a loop, and they interact in two ways: either two strings coalesce into one, or one string splits into two. Depending on how the strings are vibrating and rotating, they can represent any of the known particles of matter, from quarks to electrons. The nature of the interacting particles...
There is an even bigger stumbling block: a complete lack of experimental evidence. No particle accelerator has ever detected anything that suggests the existence of strings. Still, string theorists believe that the immediate goal is not necessarily to search for new particles but simply to reconcile the mathematics of the theory. Says Schwarz: "Experimentalists would love for me to say such and such is an unambiguous consequence of string theory, and if you find it, it's right, and if not, it's dead. But I can't say that yet. They'll just have to be patient...
Witten is optimistic that superstrings hold the key to the long-sought TOE, though he and other theorists hesitate to predict whether the remaining problems of the new theory will be solved in five years or 50. "String theory has a very rich and complicated structure that we don't understand much about," says Witten. "But enough beautiful things have been discovered that we're pretty sure we've just found the tip of the iceberg." --By Natalie Angier...