You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well you just might find...
You'll get what you need

"The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism has two outstanding characteristics. One is its class nature: it openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat. The other is its practicality: it emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice."

Bearded young men, and beaded young women sat around for hours discussing the deeper mysteries of these sayings (pretending this crap made any sense) when they SHOULD have been in chemistry class probing the deeper mysteries of the periodic table.

The basis of the theory is that all matter is composed of strings. The strings themselves are the smallest possible particles, with a length of 10-33 cm, and no width or height. Strings can be open or closed. Closed strings have the shape of a circle or oval, and open strings have ends. A string occupies one single point in space-time at any one time. Its path through time can be shown in a space vs time graph, and is called a worldsheet. The superstring theory can describe the three forces (electroweak, strong nuclear, and gravitational) if the tension in the string is 1039 tons. The predictions of this theory are identical to general relativity in most cases. However, at a distance of 10-33cm (the quantum level), the two theories differ.

One problem with string theory is that it only works in ten or twenty-six dimensions. This is because if there are any other number of dimensions, mathematical anomalies appear. The question then has to be asked, where are the other six dimensions? In normal life there are only four. However, the Kaluza-Klein Theory shows that it is possible for a dimension to be "curled" up into an extremely tiny ball (10-31 cm long), which we could obviously not detect. In string theory, this is what has happened to the other six dimensions. It is theorised that they curled up just after the Big Bang. It is possible that if some variables in the Big Bang were different to what they turned out to be, some or all of these extra dimensions would have expanded. What would such a universe look like? Obviously, our 4-dimensional perceptions cannot imagine what it would be like, but the possibility of it happening remains.

Actually, that's not much more obtuse than the Mao quote above. By the way that 10-33cm bit is known to those of us with a heavy, HEAVY background in physics as the "Planck Length."

But you already knew that.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer reminisces
with reporters about his days on the family farm in
Central Park on Manhattan Island.

( Photo: AP/Kenneth Lambert) ____________________________________________________________________________________