Jim Gates, physics professor and string theorist at the University of Maryland, is best known outside academia for his ability to explain the super-cerebral world of theoretical physics to scientific dummies.
In one oft-viewed PBS video, Gates endeavors to define string theory in 30 seconds, asking: What’s left after splitting an atom 35 times? “We have no instruments to measure that, and so people like me have been working on a piece of mathematics called string theory and superstring theory to answer that question. We think there are filaments there.”
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