"Who Got Einstein's Office" [.]

[fiefoe]

Things I didn't learn in 'The Elegant Universe':

• In essence, the process of compactification amounts to getting rid of unwanted dimensions by making them too small to be noticeable.
• The usual way around the problem was "renormalization," a corrective process which amounts to subtracting one infinity from another, leaving you at the end with a value of finite size.
• For once strings seemed to have everything going for them. They incorporated gravity without getting into the problem of infinities, they incorporated all the forces and all the particles, and they did it all without being subject to the embarrassing odd-even-dimension problem posed by Witten.
• "The Theory depends for its existence upon magical coincidences, miraculous cancellations, and relations among seemingly unrelated (and possibly undiscovered) fields of mathematics. Are these properties reasons to accept the reality of superstrings?"
  

__  Conway realized that the right combination of glider guns and gliders could do everything that computers do. A stream of gliders and the spaces between them could stand for a succession of binary digits, ones and zeroes. Glider collisions could be logical gates, with the incoming glider stream being the input data, and the debris resulting from the collision being the output.

__ The cosmological constant has been measured-in fact it's the single most accurate measurement ever made in the history of science, accurate to within one part in 10^120. It turns out that the cosmological constant is almost exactly zero, which means that empty space is almost absolutely flat.

eldritch, inanition

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