Tom Banks of Rutgers University and Willy Fischler of the University of Texas at Austin, together with Leonard Susskind and Stephen Shenker, both now at Stanford, have formulated a version of string/M-theory in which zero-branes are the fundamental ingredients that can be combined to generate strings and the other, higher dimensional branes. This proposal, known as Matrix theory—still another possible meaning for the “M” in “M-theory”—has generated an avalanche of follow-up research, but the difficult mathematics involved has so far prevented scientists from bringing the approach to
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