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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Y2K" data-source="post: 2624902" data-attributes="member: 35049">String Theory: Knowing the Mind of God            The human race can and will know the mind of God, the origin of the universe, and how our physical world works.  The answer is in the complex and mysterious world of String Theory.  For the past 75 years physicists have strived for the ultimate goal of a unified theory of physics.  This effort has been futile but now String Theory offers a new hope to end that search.  String Theory has been developing for more than 20 years with a break through here and there and finally today we have the best option to explain our universe.  When scientists look toward the big bang there is a hazy cloud surrounding it because of the extreme temperatures involved.  But the answer is not going to come from physical observation it will be mathematical.  String Theory allows physicists to combine the equations of general relativity (the equations of the very large) with the equations of quantum mechanics (the equations of the very small).  This allows scientists to look at the big bang with more detail than ever before.  The consequences of this are absolutely profound for we as human beings will be able to know how the universe came into existence and what the fate of the universe will be.  There is some opposition to string theory but all of the other arguments can be put down by simple logical reasoning.            First let’s start by going through a brief overview of the search for a theory of everything.  Currently four basic forces govern our physical universe: the weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, electromagnetic force, and gravity.  Each force emits a field that permeates throughout space.  The strong and weak nuclear forces are responsible for holding atoms together and radioactive decay (A tiny particle could smash a big hole…).  The electromagnetic force governs magnets and the light spectrum which is responsible for all types of light including: microwaves, radio waves, infrared waves, and visible light.  There are even force particles that govern forces such as the photon for the electromagnetic force and the W and Z particles for the weak nuclear force (Ross 1).  Gravity is the most widely know force but it is the weakest and in the standard model it has no force particle.  This is a counterintuitive thought that gravity is the weakest but it is true because gravity is only effective on large scales. As the string physicists Brian Greene puts it “an ordinary refrigerator magnet can pick up a paper clip, thereby overcoming the pull of the entire earth’s gravity” (255).  The ultimate goal is to have the theory of everything that will govern all of these individual forces with one set of equations. Albert Einstein is considered the first person to actively search for a theory of everything.  After developing his theories of relativity he was compelled to search for a theory of everything because of quantum mechanics. He was upset that according to quantum mechanics the world of particles is based on probability.  This means that a scientist could never know where exactly a particle is.  Einstein showed his disgust for this with the famous phrase “God does not play dice” (Einstein qtd. in Hawking 26).  Quantum mechanics is a field of science dealing with the very small.  The orders of magnitude that quantum mechanics deal with are about a plank length which is about 6.626x10^-34.  When physicists examine our world at that size they must use mathematics and have a vivid imagination because our instruments can come nowhere near this tiny size.  When they work through their equations they find a world of fluctuations and uncertainty (Hawking 44-45).  In Einstein’s time quantum mechanics had just emerged as an infant theory and it was revolutionary.  Einstein saw the problem with quantum mechanics and it was that the equations of quantum mechanics did not work with gravity so he set out to find a theory of everything to solve the problem.  Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life in utter isolation searching for this theory and he never got to see it realized (Hooft, Gerard ’t, et al).  This idea of a theory of everything was pushed aside for the next thirty years.                  The idea of this theory regained popularity in the 1960’s and 1970’s but at the time a theory called the standard model was accepted and for most general cases it is accepted today.  It is “a theory that accurately describes all the forces and particles we observe in our laboratories and provides a basis for understanding virtually everything else in physical science” (Weinberg).  The standard model describes the smallest most fundamental constituents of matter as tiny points that we know as particles.  There are 57 different fundamental particles including: electrons, quarks, and neutrinos.  Everything in the universe is made up of these tiny particles as they combine to form atoms and molecules all the way up to human beings.  String theory suggests that “if we could examine these [fundamental] particles with even greater precision-a precision many orders of magnitude beyond our present technological capacity-we would find that each is not point like but instead consists of a tiny, one-dimensional loop” (B. Greene).  String theory may seem unnecessary, the saying goes “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” well it is broke and small points need to be even smaller strings.  It has to deal with the fact that the standard model describes virtually everything in the universe.  The standard model cannot describe our world on very, very tiny scales which automatically puts that model into serious doubt as to ever being a theory of everything.  String theory will solve this problem.            String theory is sometimes referred to as super string theory and has been around since about 1970 when it was discovered by Yoshiro Nambu of the University of Chicago.  At first the theory was looked at as a misconception because it could only describe certain particles.  But years later it was found that if two particles were described together using a principle of “supersymmetry” every particle could be described hence the name super string theory (String as a Theory of Everything).  Many odd features arise when we are describing string theory; for starters string theory’s equations describe our world as a vibrating symphony of harmonics.  The tiny strings vibrate in different ways to form the 57 elementary particles described by the standard model.  The vibrations from these strings can be looked at as similar to how a violin string when vibrated produces different sounds.  Instead of sounds, however, the strings produce different particles.  The shorter the wavelength of the vibrating string the more mass the particle will have (Hawking 52).   Because of this odd universal nature of string theory it offers its first proof of being the answer and it has to deal with gravity and quantum mechanics.  The reason gravity does not work with quantum mechanics is because there is no force particle that governs gravity on very small scales.  It has been proven that if physicists could find a way to describe gravity on very small scales they would be a huge step closer to the theory of everything. String theory offers this proof with the graviton particle.  The equations of string theory describe a particle that would be the “messenger particle of gravity” called the graviton (Zee).  This is compelling evidence that string theory is the answer to a theory of everything by offering a particle to describe gravity at very tiny scales.  An objection has been raised that this means nothing until we have detected the graviton but the reason we have not is because of our limited technological capacity.  Considering gravity is the weakest force it implies a single graviton would be so weak that actually detecting it may not be possible for quite some time, if ever.  The equations have proven that the graviton must exist and physicists have fitted these equations into other ideas offering even more evidence that string theory is correct.            A major argument against String theory is that almost nothing it describes has been experimentally proven but physicists such as Brian Greene hope that with the next generation of particle accelerators String Theory may become fact.  Difficulties arise with the equations due to how many dimensions string theory describes.  In everyday life we all experience three dimensions front and back, left and right, up and down but according to string theory there are ten dimensions with one being time: “A string has to vibrate in 10 space-time dimensions, which implies that six extra dimensions exist that are too small to have yet been detected” (Bousso and Polchinski).  According to string theory these extra dimensions are curled up but are impossible to detect because of their size (Bousso and Polchinski).  These six extra curled up dimensions can be imagined as extremely small six dimensional shapes placed side by side.  These shapes have been named Calabi-Yau shapes and could come in many different varieties (Greene 369).  Although they have not yet been detected it is thought that with more powerful particle accelerators physicists will be able to detect them.  Another affect of these next particle accelerators would be that they could possibly give us the first physical string.  Even more amazing is that these particle accelerators could be capable of forming very tiny black holes but no reason to fear because they would disappear as fast as they came.With all of this new insight into the world of the very small within the next few years we will be seeing the hard work of string physicists become fact.            An amazing feature of string theory is that it is not just strings that are involved, the equations also include branes.  These branes exist as very large multi-dimensional planes and may even be large enough to be the so called “borders” of our universe.  The easiest way to imagine these branes is as a two dimensional (but they can be any number of dimensions less than or equal to eleven) surface that strings can attach to at one or both ends and even lie on these one-dimensional branes (Bousso and Polchinski).  The most exciting part of string theory describes these branes as being the boundaries of our universe.  Imagine the universe being surrounded by six walls forming a cube containing our universe.  Our universe would be inside a hypothetical three dimensional brane and since open strings attach to branes no string could ever escape the universe.  The key point of this idea is that it explains why we are not able to detect the other dimensions.  Since the strings are bound within the branes it means that no particle such as a photon of light could detect the other dimensions outside our universe since they are actually strings that are bound within our three-brane.  This gives a logical answer to why we do not see other dimensions (Greene 391-394).             One exception to the fact that nothing could leave our three-brane is the graviton.  Since the graviton is a closed loop string it would not get stuck to the brane because only open ended strings get attached.  This allows the graviton to leave our brane, seek out other dimensions and come back to allow us to detect it.  This is excellent because it allows the extra dimensions to be as large as a human hair without physicists being able detect them because gravity is so weak we cannot detect it at any smaller levels (Green 400).  This reiterates the fact that string theory is on the verge of physically being proven and gives more backing to the fact that it is the “theory of everything”.  This brane scenario also gives way to many ideas such as having other universes outside our own.  We would be living in a multi-verse!            The best argument against string theory has to deal with the number of solutions possible to the equations.  Thousands of solutions exist for string theory and this fact has placed a large cloud of doubt around string theory.  Recent advancements in combing these solutions have lifted that cloud.  The approach is called string model building (Flam).  The string theorist Edward Witten has worked through these many possible solutions and discovered an interesting fact.  “Some of the equations involved are a kind of mirror image of other equations called dualities” (Filkin 261).  According to Stephen Hawking “not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life” (57). These dualities have been found to be particularly important in specifically five versions of the equations.  Those five versions are named: Type 1, Type 2B, Type 2A, Heterotic-0, and Heterotic-E (Hawking 56).  When combined these different string theories form one string theory named M-theory.  M-theory is precise in calculating many different calculations dealing with the universe which proves that without a doubt string theory is the theory of everything and that it is more powerful than ever thought possible.            With all of this evidence proving that string theory is the theory of everything it means that we must wait for better instruments to physically prove it. Our theories are beyond our technological capacity.  With every barrier knocked down that has been put before it, string theory is still standing as it continues to cast all doubts aside.  With the next generation of particle accelerators we will finally see string theory’s physical proof.  Whether it is a single part of string theory that solves the mystery or a combination it will be the greatest accomplishment in science.  String theory has proven that it can solve the problem between gravity and quantum mechanics and string theory has solved the many problems it has created.  Some of those problems have dealt with dimensions and the number of solutions.  The implications will be farther reaching than anything the human race has ever accomplished and will give us the ability to see our world in a whole new way.  We will finally be able to look at the moment of creation.  Who knows maybe we will even see God himself jump starting the universe.</blockquote>

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