Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Theory of everything' tying researchers up in Knots
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005
The most celebrated theory in modern physics faces increasing attacks from skeptics who fear it has lured a generation of researchers down an intellectual dead end.
In its original, simplified form, circa the mid-1980s, string theory held that reality consists of infinitesimally small, wiggling objects called strings, which vibrate in ways
that yield the different subatomic particles that comprise the cosmos. An analogy is the vibrations on a violin string, which yield different musical notes.
Advocates claimed that string theory would smooth out the conflicts between Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics. The result, they said, would be a grand unifying "theory
of everything," which could explain everything from the nature of matter to the Big Bang to the fate of the cosmos.
READ ON:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi file=/chronicle/archive/2005/03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL
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Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005
The most celebrated theory in modern physics faces increasing attacks from skeptics who fear it has lured a generation of researchers down an intellectual dead end.
In its original, simplified form, circa the mid-1980s, string theory held that reality consists of infinitesimally small, wiggling objects called strings, which vibrate in ways
that yield the different subatomic particles that comprise the cosmos. An analogy is the vibrations on a violin string, which yield different musical notes.
Advocates claimed that string theory would smooth out the conflicts between Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics. The result, they said, would be a grand unifying "theory
of everything," which could explain everything from the nature of matter to the Big Bang to the fate of the cosmos.
READ ON:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi file=/chronicle/archive/2005/03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL
Lawrence Krauss argues that string theorists have produced no
satisfactory explanations for anything. Photo courtesy of
Case Western Reserve University
Michio Kaku suggests that humans might eventually travel to
alternate universes, perhaps via wormholes. Photo courtesy of the
City University of New York
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