"By 1973–'74 there were many good reasons to stop working on string theory," Schwarz wrote. Researchers disagree over whether, with modifications, it's still the best candidate for a "theory of everything" or whether theorists should abandon it in favor of other topics. String theory today doesn't exactly match string theory of the 1960s and '70s. It needed a total of 10 dimensions, with six visible only to the perspective of the little strings, much as a powerline looks like a 1D line to birds flying far overhead but becomes a 3D cylinder to an ant crawling on the wire. The next step, theorists hoped, would be to find the right way to describe the folding and movement of strings, and everything else should have followed.īut that initial simplicity turned out to come at the cost of unexpected complexity - string math didn't work in our familiar four dimensions (three of space and one of time). In addition to taming gravity, string theory was attractive for its potential to explain so-called fundamental constants like the mass of an electron. A string of a particular length striking a particular note might gain the properties of a photon, another string folded and vibrating with a different frequency could play the role of a quark, and so on. String theory turns the page on the standard description of the universe by replacing all matter and force particles with just one element: tiny vibrating strings that twist and turn in complicated ways that, from our perspective, look like particles. "A one-dimensional object - that's the thing that really tames the infinities that come up in the calculations," string theory expert Marika Taylor, a theoretical physicist at the University of Southampton in England, told. String theory math required six additional dimensions (for a total of 10) visible only to the little strings, much as a powerline looks like a 1D line to birds flying far overhead but a 3D cylinder to an ant crawling on the wire. Strings, and only strings, can collide and rebound cleanly without implying physically impossible infinities. One possible solution, which theorists borrowed from nuclear physicists in the 1970s, is to get rid of the idea of problematic, point-like graviton particles. Theorists can predict what a gravity particle should look like, but when they try to calculate what happens when two such "gravitons" smash together, they get an infinite amount of energy packed into a small space - a sure sign, according to astrophysicist Paul Sutter in a previous article for, that the math is missing something.
Gravity seems not to exist as a particle of its own, either. Instead, its effects are only noticeable and important on the scale of moons, planets, stars and galaxies. But unlike the other forces (electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force), gravity is so weak that it can't be detected or observed on the scale of a particle. It’s one of the four forces that physicists use to describe nature. The four fundamental forces of nature are gravity, electromagnetism, the “weak force” responsible for radioactive decay of some nuclei, and the “strong force” binding the atomic nucleus together.In Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity is a force that warps space-time around massive objects. The dream to synthesize all known physical forces has been a longstanding challenge many physicists, including Einstein, have embarked on the pursuit and failed. Most of all, what I like best is that he remains open to the possibility that there may ultimately not be a single unifying theory after all, encoded into a single tidy equation. And in this wonderful little book, that is precisely what he does-explain in clear and simple terms the conceptual breakthroughs, the blind alleys and the unanswered questions-in the search for a grand unified theory of everything.
If there is anyone who can demystify the esoteric mathematics and physics of string theory, it is he. He is also the host of the wildly successful and popular weekly radio program Science Fantastic. Kaku is a futurist, broadcaster and professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York. The prolific author of multiple popular science books, Mr. What’s God got to do with it? Given that the majority of physicists are agnostics at best, I have always found it puzzling that my community is so obsessed with God’s mind, whether or not God plays dice, the God particle and seeing God-and now with Michio Kaku’s “The God Equation.” Title notwithstanding, this is an excellent book written by a masterful science communicator elaborating on a subject that is his research home turf-superstring theory.
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