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Question of the Day
Question:
"Dr. Hal, could you give us the lowdown on string theory?"Answer:
Actually, this isn't really one of my favorites. In fact, I don't care for it at all, yet it keeps popping up. The trouble with the question is, it's hard to explain, and lacks the hefty entertainment value a good question needs. But better here than on the show, so here goes. Until fairly recently, top scientists believed that supergravity was probably the right answer to the unification of physics, the so-called "unified field theory" that Einstein (not the one from the Junkyard) and others worked on for so long. But in the mid-Eighties, various string theories came in, postulating that the basic objects in our universe are not particles, which may or may not occupy a single point in space, but "strings," things that have length but no other dimension. Got that? Oh, I can see your eyes glazing over. Look, in string theories, what they used to think of as particles are pictured as waves traveling down the string, like waves on a vibrating kite string or the string that links two kids' tin can telephones. The emission or absorption of one particle by another corresponds to the dividing or joining together of strings. In particle theories, the gravitational force of, say, the Sun on the Earth was pictured as the emission of a graviton by a particle in the Sun and its absorption by a particle in the Earth. But in string theory, this process would be like an H-shaped tube or pipe. The two vertical sides of the H would correspond to the "particles" in the Sun and the Earth; the horizontal crossbar would stand for the graviton shooting between them. Of course, these string theories are consistent only if space-time has either ten or twenty-six dimensions instead of the usual four... This is the point in the explanation when it suited Chicken to dump a huge, tangled mass of dirty string on me, draping it over my head. He knows what an audience finds entertaining, doesn't he?
Askdrhal.com by
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