Word: gravitons
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...Randall hopes that the Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland will test her theories. Colliding proton beams at a combined energy of 14 trillion electron volts, it will start operation in 2007. The collider could produce particles such as the sought-after graviton believed to convey the gravitational force, or it could produce actual strings...
Gravity, however, would still remain the odd force out. No experimental evidence has emerged to confirm the existence of its transmitting agent, the graviton. And though this hypothetical particle has been accommodated mathematically in unified theories, such models have been fatally flawed by anomalies that leave the theories meaningless. The crux of the problem: the electroweak and strong forces are quantum forces, whereas gravity is still defined only as a consequence of the curvature of space and time and thus cannot yet be explained in terms of quantum physics...
...eliminated at least one problem that had bedeviled scientists trying to meld general relativity and quantum mechanics. This difficulty arose because space lacks smoothness below subatomic scales. When distances become unimaginably small, space bubbles and churns frenetically, an effect sometimes referred to as quantum foam. Pointlike particles, including the graviton, are likely to be tossed about by quantum foam, like Lilliputian boats to which ripples in the ocean loom as large waves. Strings, by contrast, are miniature ocean liners whose greater size lets them span many waves at once, making them impervious to such disturbances...
...French deconstructionism, Ehrenreich went scrounging for morsels of social insight in chic restaurants, living rooms, corporate offices, Playboy magazines and even a make-believe White House Situation Room. She returns laughing -- at Ronald Reagan; at the American medical system, which would rather produce a "temple-sized ultraquark-powered graviton for the visualization of intestinal gas" than put up with sick people; and at the "unbearable being of whiteness," which led presidential candidate Richard Gephardt to tell "moving stories about his youth as a poor black boy in the South, and how he had inexplicably turned white, clear...
Here a short digression is necessary. Modern quantum mechanics describes the forces between particles in terms of other, "mediating" particles. The mediating particle of gravity is called the graviton. The mediating particle of the electromagnetic force is called the photon. And the mediating particle of the "strong" force, proposed in 1934 by the Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa, is called the "pion...