I mean: "squarks", "gravitinos", "photinos", "gluinos", "selectrons" and even "winos" (no alcohol involved there, just the superpartner, or shadow partner, of the W+- boson). Maybe nobody's sure of what String Theory is, exactly, but the name variations are certainly entertaining. Used to be, you just needed a copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to name a particle (Murray Gell-Mann took "quark" it from the sentence "Three quarks for Muster Mark" in that book).

Anyway, from today's New York Times: String Theory, At 20, Explains It All (or not):

"String theory, the Italian physicist Dr. Daniele Amati once said, was a piece of 21st-century physics that had fallen by accident into the 20th century.

And, so the joke went, would require 22nd-century mathematics to solve."

Albert Einstein: "God does not play dice with the universe."

Stephen Hawking: "Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."

Niels Bohr: "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."

Exactly.

Categories: science
Posted by diego on December 7 2004 at 10:52 AM