STRING THEORY GROUPIE — by Steve Nadis
Last week I spoke momentarily to the secretary of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP), trying to locate a visiting physicist from Stanford. This week, I was back at CTP again, trying to locate another physicist from Stanford. The secretary, who’d only seen me for a total of 10 seconds in her life, acted like I was an all-too-familiar fixture at the center. “He’s upstairs, in the same office his wife was in,” she told me without looking up.
Today, meanwhile, I was at Harvard’s high-energy physics center, talking to a visiting scientist from Princeton. One of Harvard’s string gurus popped into the office in the middle of the interview and shot me a look that said: “Oh, it’s you again.” So it’s clear that I’ve now become an official string theory groupie. That’s not the goal I set for myself when I embarked on a writing career many years ago. Still, that might be one step above being a group theory stringie.
