A Super Time to Renormalize

What incredibly superlative times these are! Modern advances in physics are beyond description, or so their names imply: We have discovered superconducrors and superfluids, predicred supersymmetries and superstrings, observed supernovas, supergalaxies and superclusters; and we analyze them all on supercomputers. But where do we go from here? We avoided the dilemma for many years but technology has caught up with us at last. No words can describe our latest creations. The nextgeneration accelerator will have unprecedented size and efficiency, but we can only express its overwhelming capacity by repeating ourselves, as in on awestruck stutter: We call it the Superconducting Super Collider. The high‐temperature superconductors discovered last year have been verbally elevated to their proper level only at the expense of the lower‐temperature materials, which have been downgraded to “conventional superconductors.” (Do I detect a contradiction in terms?)

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