Last year, Nobel laureate and Harvard physicist Sheldon Glas how stirred up theoretical physicists by launching an attack on superstring theory. In an article in The Sciences (Volume 28, number 3, pages 22-2S, May/June 1988) excerpted from his autobiography (Interactions: A Journey Through the Mind of a Particle Physicist, written with Ben Bova, Warner Books, 1988), Glaskow argued that physics theories have traditioanlly been based on experimental evidence. But now, he wrote, “many of the best and brightest young physicists have chosen a different, entirely theoretical approach to understanding matter.... Superstrings is the name of their game, a synthesis of some of the most bizarre notions ever put forward. According to this new religion, space has nine dimensions, not just the three we see.... Superstring theory identifies particles not as pointlike structures bid as tiny loops of string. There is only one kind of string, and the wiggles of the...
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