Wow. Physicists are really concerned with what other physicists are thinking about.

They get catty.

I'm reading "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson and he has a lot of weirdly detailed accounts of this kind of thing throughout history. Right now I'm reading the section on the discovery that DNA is a double helix.

It's as if a 21st century theory dropped into our 20th century laps, at least that what Ed Witten says.

We can study it with math, but we are very far away from proving it with experiments (which, in the end, is all that matters).

The Large Hadron Collider @ CERN, once it is built, will go a long way in proving or disproving string theory. But this theory has gone a long way in explaining what happens in black holes, which has been a huge success for string/m theory.

Yeah Emily, the first thing that came to my mind when I read that article (besides the similarity between physicists and the high school cheerleading squad) was Newton and Liebnitz and the awkward dual birth of the calculus.

On the side note of the double helix, poor Rosalind.

Apparently, in one of the men's autobiographies (I don't remembe which one) they just ripped her to shreds and said she had the fashion sense of "an adolescent member of the blue stocking society" or something. The book had to be edited to soften the insults.

Sounds like Watson. Something something people in glass houses...