Word: einstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fact, Greene believes a young Einstein, starting his professional career now rather than at the turn of the past century, would have overcome his deep distrust of quantum mechanics and enthusiastically embraced branes and sparticles and superstrings. And given his almost superhuman ability to transcend conventional thinking and visualize the world in unprecedented ways, he might have been the one to crack the ultimate theory. It may in the end take an Einstein to complete Einstein's unfinished intellectual symphony...
...integrating gravity with nature's other fundamental forces. This framework is popularly known as string theory because it postulates that the smallest, indivisible components of the universe are not point-like particles but infinitesimal loops that resemble tiny vibrating strings. "String theory," pioneering theorist Edward Witten of Einstein's own Institute for Advanced Study has observed, "is a piece of 21st century physics that fell by chance into the 20th century...
...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...
What would Einstein have made of such wild imaginings? Columbia's Greene, for one, thinks he would have loved them. After all, Greene notes in his recently published book, The Elegant Universe, Einstein played around with the idea of extra dimensions as a strategy for producing a unified field theory...
...Einstein to become a modern icon, especially in America, required a total revision of the definition of a hero. Anti-intellectualism has been as integral a part of American culture as the drive for universal education, and the fact that both have existed concurrently may account for the low status of teachers. In America it is not enough to be smart; one must compensate for one's intelligence by also showing the canniness and real-world power of the cowboy and the pioneer. Einstein did this. He was the first modern intellectual superstar, and he won his stardom...