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Supersymmetry and Parallel Dimensions Harvard Physicst Randall among world’s leading string theorists Published On Friday, January 06, 2006  1:00 AM By ADRIAN J. SMITH Crimson Staff Writer Professor of Physics Lisa Randall ’83, recently named one of Newsweek’s most influential people of 2006, rose to the top with her theories on gravity. (Photo credit: CRIMSON/GLORIA B. HO) Professor of Physics Lisa Randall ’83 saw how strong gravity could be during a climbing fall in New Hampshire two years ago. She was performing a “challenging” move when she took a surprising fall, she says. Instead of stopping the fall, her support...

'Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots- Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer Monday, March 14, 2005 The most celebrated theory in modern physics faces increasing attacks from skeptics who fear it has lured a generation of researchers down an intellectual dead end. In its original, simplified form, circa the mid-1980s, string theory held that reality consists of infinitesimally small, wiggling objects called strings, which vibrate in ways that yield the different subatomic particles that comprise the cosmos. An analogy is the vibrations on a violin string, which yield different musical notes. Advocates claimed that string theory would smooth out...

String fellows100 years after Einstein changed physics for ever, Alok Jha visits a leafy corner of Princeton to meet his intellectual heirs - still hunting for a theory of everythingAlok JhaThursday January 20, 2005GuardianEdward Witten is so softly spoken that his voice sometimes threatens to drift away completely. His desk is a jumble of papers and his blackboard a mess of equations. But his hushed words come straight to the point and are infused with understanding and passion.Witten's quiet manner belies his status. In his role as de facto scientist-in-chief of string theory, Witten, the Charles Simonyi professor of mathematical...

Nature 433, 10 (06 January 2005); doi:10.1038/433010a In search of hidden dimensions So far, string theory has defied experiments, but Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks he has found a way to put the idea to the test. Geoff Brumfiel finds out how. J. IDE/HARVARD UNIV. NEWS OFFICE String fellow: Nima Arkani-Hamed hopes that particle-collision experiments will show that gravity leaks into other dimensions. Ask most theorists when they think their calculations will be tested experimentally and you'll be told "decades" or sometimes, more honestly, "never".But ask Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at Harvard University, and he will give you a far closer...

Strings attached Wanted: Proof that the mother of all theories is correct. Pathik Guha reports But is that physics? That seemed to have been the caveat raised by Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate physicist, against the string theory, popularly known as the Theory of Everything. Though the experts, not particularly fond of hypes, don’t like the name that much, the string theory is one of the attempts to unify the two seemingly irreconciliable concepts — relativity and quantum mechanics — which between them explain everything from an apple’s fall to a picture’s formation on a TV screen. Albert Einstein, always...

The Growth of Inflation Twenty-five years after Alan Guth turned cosmology on its head, what's the latest story of the universe's first moments? by Davide Castelvecchi Photo: Fred Ullrich It was a true Eureka moment if there ever was one. On the night of December 6, 1979, an obscure Stanford Linear Accelerator Center postdoc was up late, sweating over an even more obscure problem about particles called magnetic monopoles. Looking at his calculations the next day, the usually low-key Alan Guth annotated the words "SPECTACULAR REALIZATION" at the top of the page. Guth had discovered cosmic inflation, an idea which...

Florida Physicist Says Dark Matter, Extra Dimensions Related And Possibly Detectable the universe is the "twilight zone" Gainesville -May 19, 2003 A team of scientists that includes a University of Florida physicist has suggested that two of the biggest mysteries in particle physics and astrophysics -- the existence of extra time and space dimensions and the composition of an invisible cosmic substance called dark matter -- may be connected. "For the most part, these two questions have been treated separately in the past, and for the first time we're making a direct link," said Konstantin Matchev, a UF assistant...