Word: final
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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With Israel promising a final troop withdrawal by July, Hizballah is being hailed for doing what Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians and Palestinians have never done: driving Israeli soldiers off Arab land by force. Hizballah leaders can barely contain their eagerness for the day when their fighters, crying "God is great!," will march into the buffer strip along the southern Lebanese border that Israel calls the Security Zone. The Lebanese postal service is issuing stamps in honor of the jihad. And though still on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, accused in the suicide bombings of U.S. diplomats and military...
According to preliminary market surveys, there are 10,000 would-be space tourists willing to spend $1 million each to visit the final frontier. Space Adventures in Arlington, Va., has taken more than 130 deposits for a two-hour, $98,000 space tour tentatively (and somewhat dubiously) set to occur by 2005. Says Gene Meyers of the Space Island Group: "Space is the next exotic vacation spot...
Even without new experiments, it may be possible to judge a final theory by whether it explains all the apparently arbitrary aspects of the standard model. But there are explanations and explanations. We would not be satisfied with a theory that explains the standard model in terms of something complicated and arbitrary, in the way astronomers before Copernicus explained the motions of planets by piling epicycles upon epicycles...
When at last we have a simple, compelling, mathematically consistent theory of gravitation and other forces that explains all the apparently arbitrary features of the standard model, it will be a good bet that this theory really is final. Our description of nature has become increasingly simple. More and more is being explained by fewer and fewer fundamental principles. But simplicity can't increase without limit. It seems likely that the next major theory that we settle on will be so simple that no further simplification would be possible...
...discovery of a final theory is not going to help us cure cancer or understand consciousness, however. We probably already know all the fundamental physics we need for these tasks. The branch of science in which a final theory is likely to have its greatest impact is cosmology. We have pretty good confidence in the ability of the standard model to trace the present expansion of the universe back to about a billionth of a second after its start...