On my flight home from New York last weekend, I finally finished the last 23 pages of
Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. Though I've finished the book, my final thoughts will take a couple of postings. As I've said before, this was a pretty dense book. Many paragraphs were of the order that required more than one reading to fully grasp.
One thing I feel I
did understand was that the entire concept of String Theory is almost entirely theoretical. Basically, String Theory is the idea that the universe can be explained in entirely mathematical terms or not. And because of the size in which String Theory deals, there is almost no way,
experimentally, to prove that String Theory is correct. At least, not yet.
Since the enlightenment, or even going further back, to Aristotle, there has been an underlying human need within our society to explain the universe in rational terms. It seems to me that String Theory, because of certain mathematical relationships too uncanny to dismiss, is trying to do this.
Another thing that Greene touches upon in his book is the completely different way in which physicists and mathematicians attack problems using the same mathematical tools. Here is an excerpt that I think really eloquently illustrates the difference between physicists and mathematicians
AND delves a little bit into the psyche of what
kinds of people seek out careers in either profession:
"This reflects the large cultural divide between the disciplines of physics and mathematics, and as string theory blurs their borders, the vast differences in language, methods and styles of each field become increasingly apparent. Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules and brush the edge of acceptability in the search for solutions. Mathematicians are more like classical composers, typically working within a much tighter framework, reluctant to go to the next step until all previous onces have been established with due rigor. Each approach has its advantages as well as drawbacks; each provides a unique outlet for creative discovery. Like modern and classical music, it's not that one approach is right and the other wrong - the methods one chooses to use are largelly a matter of taste and training."
Maybe this metaphor spoke to me because I'm a musician, but either way, I think it sort of paints a picture.
String Theory deals with all forms of physical reality. In this way it is different from quantum theory, which only deals with matter on a subatomic scale, or Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which deals with objects that are either huge or moving at incredible speeds, such as those speeds nearing the speed of light. So, String Theory gets to deal with black holes. What's
very interesting about black holes (and unfortunately, I'm not sure if this data is from RESEARCH or from EXPERIMENTAL DATA, but...) is that despite the fact that they are huge and suck up everything that comes within reach of their
event horizon,
"except for a small nubmer of distinguishing features, all black holes appear to be alike." Those distinguishing features, i.e. mass, electric and force charges and spin, are
the same exact features that distinguish elementary particles such as quarks, muons and taus from one another. Essentially, These gigantic galaxy-sized phenomena are overgrown elementary particles!!!! How crazy is that?!?!?
When I consider
ontology, I often imagine the universe as being infinitely tiny, rather than infinitely large, and the fact above only makes me wonder at it all the more. I think about the entire sequence of one's life, particularly my own, as being some infinitessimally minute factor in some larger scheme. Like, take for instance all of the complexity in respiration. If we were able to zoom down upon on a molecule of oxygen being inhaled by a goat for example, and then down to one atom, and then one electron and then realize that the electron was really a black hole in a micro-universe, and then there's this little guy named Brian in that universe and his entire life, which seems so long to him, is in the macro-universe a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, and regardless of what his life seemed to amount to in his perception, it was really just this tiny role that only had the same kind of role I actually have
NOW with the nearest black hole. Which in turn only has this little tiny interaction with it's own atom, in fact, the elecron only exists as PROBABILITY in an atom, and then that atom is part of a molecule, which gets sucked up in that chemical reaction that we learned in Biology class which makes CO2.
OK, yes, I am a freak.
bhofmeister13