ColumnAry: June 2011

Friday, June 10, 2011

Strings and branes

Strings and branes.

'M-Theory' is the name of the unknown theory of everything which would combine all five Superstring theories and the Supergravity at 11 dimensions together. It's not a completed theory but rather an approach for producing one. For me it's fascinating to read about (super)strings, (super)gravity, quarks, fermions/bosons, worldline/screens, (mem)branes, curled-up dimensions, supersymmetry, space and time. It makes me even more curious. Recently I heard about two interwoven, non-interacting, worlds at atomic distance. Can you imagine? Two worlds so close and not feeling their existence.

Strings and Branes

Came across a beautiful phrase: "String theory may have the capability to show that all of the happenings in the universe - from the dance of subatomic quarks to the movements of orbiting binary stars, from the big bang to the whirl of celestial galaxies - are reflections of one grand physical principle, one master equation, the theory of everything".

And what about this one?: "In string theory, the elementary particles we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the 'musical notes' or excitation modes of elementary strings. The strings in string theory are floating in spacetime. Nonetheless, they have tension".

A brane-world scenario with curled-up dimensions

We still don't know if string theory may be the right theory of nature:
As it stands, string theories are unproved, and perhaps unprovable, as they involve interactions at energy levels far beyond any we can handle. But they are beautiful, to those versed enough in the language of mathematics to follow them. And in their beauty (and perhaps in their impenetrability) they are the heirs to Einstein's - unsuccessful - attempts to produce a unified field theory.