The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything by K. C. Cole

The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything by K. C. Cole

Author:K. C. Cole [Cole, K. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology, Educational, Non-Fiction, Physics, Science
ISBN: 9780544079557
Google: qqW2Z0VI0t0C
Amazon: B00CR6XSJ0
Publisher: HMH
Published: 2012-07-17T23:00:00+00:00


A STRING OF MIRACLES

It’s as if some guys had set out to design a better can opener and wound up with an interstellar space ship. And then, they spent ten years looking at this thing and saying: "This won’t work as a can opener; it’s bigger than the average kitchen. ”

—SIDNEY COLEMAN

Ever since it dropped into the laptops of physicists almost thirty years ago, string theory has been surprising people with its staying power. It was discovered by accident in an attempt to solve the problem of how quarks stick together inside protons and neutrons. At first, no one even knew that the equations described strings. The theory predicted impossible, faster-than-light particles. It did not include particles of matter, but only particles that transmit forces. It seemed to require twenty-six dimensions.

Better explanations came along for the trapping of quarks, and most of the physics community looked the other way. Still, a few stalwarts stuck with strings, impressed by a string of "mathematical miracles" the theory produced. “It looked a little crazy,” remembers Caltech physicist John Schwarz, one of the few loyalists. “But I felt such a beautiful mathematical structure had to lead someplace.”

Even seemingly insurmountable obstacles turned out to be opportunities. For example, one early version of string theory produced a strange particle that didn’t seem to fit anywhere in the standard picture of the physical world. "Eventually, we decided to stop trying to get rid of the thing and take it seriously,” Schwarz said. In a classic case of looking at what everyone else had seen, but thinking what no one else had thought, Schwarz recognized the problem particle as a graviton, a “particle" of gravity. String theory went from a theory of quarks to a “theory of everything.”

Still, until five years ago, most physicists dismissed the theory as so much mathematical navel gazing, as untestable as counting angels on the head of a pin. But in a remarkable turnaround, since 1995, string theory has come out of the closet. No longer on the fringe, it has become respectable, perhaps—in some form—inevitable. “It really migrated to center stage,” said Greene, whose book on string theory, The Elegant Universe, was soon on the best-seller lists. “People are convinced that it’s not a fad; it makes a believable-—if tentative—claim to being the final theory {of every thing}.”

What changed is that string theory solved some long-standing problems previously out of reach of any other theory.

For example, string theory made sense of a proposal made by Stephen Hawking more than twenty years ago that black holes hid a precisely calculable amount of disorder inside their borders. It was hard for physicists to imagine how something as featureless as a black hole could be anything but highly ordered. A room with one piece of furniture is always more orderly than a room with one hundred pieces of furniture. The more pieces to a puzzle, the bigger the mess it will make when it falls on the floor. And a black hole, for all its



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