Quantum mechanics has been tested it works with fantastic precision. I think the important thing to bear in mind is that general relativity has been tested up the wazoo to incredible accuracy. if string theory is right-and again, I always emphasize the "if"-it is a unified theory. It's definitely a theory it has yet to be experimentally confirmed. Oh, string theory is definitely a work in progress. You keep saying "may," which means none of this is certain at all. It may be that they are the fundamental entity. But when you get down to strings, it may be that that's where the story ends. And you can ask what they're made of: quarks. You can ask what the nucleus of an atom is made of and get to the neutrons and protons. When you look at anything around you-the mug on your desk or the tabletop that you're working on-you can say, "What's it made of?" You can ask what the atoms that you hypothesize and prove by experiment make up the entity are themselves made of. One answer is that this may be the one time when that question fails to make sense. What is the string made of? We don't know for certain. So you and I are just piles of vibrations? What is it that's vibrating? Here when the little strings vibrate, they produce different particles.
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When a string on a violin vibrates differently, it produces different musical notes. And like any other string that you're more familiar with, like on a violin or a cello, the string in string theory can vibrate in different patterns. When string theory comes on the scene, everything simplifies because you have one entity: the string. Prior to string theory, when you spoke about the elementary constituents of matter, you had to talk about electrons, you had to talk about protons and neutrons, you had to talk about the quarks that make them up. The first is that we believe that it gives a uniform description of all matter and radiation and all the forces of nature in one unified language. But when you study it in detail, you find that it is for a number of reasons. NEWSWEEK: Why is going from the concept that everything is made up of little tiny atoms and subatoms to the concept that it's all fundamentally squiggly, vibrating lines such a revolutionary idea?īrian Greene: At first sight it wouldn't be. Greene recently spoke with NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker, who is-under this theory-just a vibrating mass of tiny string, about the ideas he explores in the new book. Time, which is relative to space, may not allow us to ever visit the past, but jumping into the future is possible within the laws of physics. Reality as we perceive it may in fact just be an approximation of the universe we inhabit.
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For example, one feature of string theory-also known as superstring theory-is that it suggests the universe has more than three, and possibly up to 11, spatial dimensions. Once again, assuming an audience of lay readers, Greene explains some of the more mind-melting features of today's cutting-edge physics in a language that is easy to understand. Now he's back with "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality" ( Knopf) published last month.
#Strings theory unvibrating string series
Last fall he hosted a "Nova" television series based on that book. But in 1999, he published "The Elegant Universe" ( Norton), a popular presentation of string theory that became a major best seller and Pulitzer Prize finalist. If true (and string theory has never been experimentally tested) the theory would be the unified, overarching explanation of how the universe works-the solution that physicists from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein have been seeking for centuries. The building blocks of reality, as it appears to us, are merely a pattern of their vibrations, just as strings on a guitar vibrate at different rates to produce different notes. String theory predicts that everything in the universe (from stars and suns to atoms and subatomic particles) can be broken down to incomprehensibly small loops of vibrating string. A Columbia University physics professor, Greene is one of the world's leading thinkers and writers on string theory, which purports to be the unifying theory of everything. Brian Greene likes to think he's got it all figured out.