Some of the world's greatest physicists couldn't tell you why our leading theory of everything is labelled "M" Is there an answer?
I ARRIVED at the Harvard Science Center and made my way to the fifth floor. But when I got there, a flood of students and professors came pouring down the hallway. "Is the Witten talk in there?" I asked a student emerging from the room where the lecture was scheduled to take place. "Too many people," he said. "We're changing rooms."
I was here at Harvard, looking for physicist Ed Witten, thanks to a conversation I'd had 17 years earlier in a Chinese restaurant. My father had leaned across the table and asked, "How would you define nothing?" He was trying to understand how a universe could be born of nothingness, and he enlisted me – his 15-year-old daughter who was ...
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