Science: To Catch a Fleeting Gluon

Einstein's old dream of unity may yet come true

For much of the last half of his life, Albert Einstein was preoccupied with a lonely quest. He wanted to bring together under a single set of equations all of nature's basic forces. The master of relativity never achieved his grand unification, and many colleagues scorned him for wasting his precious time on such a farfetched intellectual exercise. Last week, at a major meeting of physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., outside Chicago, Einstein's seemingly futile dream suddenly sounded far more...

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