A rchive Date
[ 29-10-2003 ]
Category
[ Science ]
sub-Categoy
[ Physics ]
|
[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/headline/entertainment/2183190
The theory of everything unfolds in 'Elegant Universe'
By DENNIS OVERBYE
New York Times
Oct. 28, 2003, 10:18AM
This is the history of science as if told by J.R.R. Tolkien or George Lucas.
By chance, so the story goes, a piece of 21st-century physics, in the form of an elegant mathematical formalism known as string theory, fell into the hands of a small group of 20th-century physicists about 30 years ago. For years they struggled to make sense of it, bewitched by its beauty, while scorned and ignored by their colleagues.
Then on a dark and stormy night in Colorado, in 1984, a pair of stalwart dreamers completed a heroic calculation and discovered that strings could be the key to understanding all natural phenomena.
Almost overnight, armies of physicists rose up from their cubicles and stormed the blackboards in search of the ultimate theory, inflamed by visions of extra dimensions, parallel universes, new forces, space-times that could rip and tear and wrap around themselves. Will they succeed? Is a new understanding of reality at hand?
Stay tuned.
This would-be revolution goes by the name of string theory, the most musical explanation of creation ever invented. It describes the elementary particles that make up nature not as little points but as vibrating strings of energy, a different "note" for each different kind of particle. How it developed and what it might mean is the subject of The Elegant Universe, starring the Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, author of the best-selling book of the same name.
The three-part rags-to-riches story is billed as the biggest project Nova has ever done, with a $3.5 million budget, gobs of animation and special effects, and appearances by many of the leading lights of modern physics and string theory.
A New Yorker by birth, Greene was just entering graduate school at Oxford University when the string theory revolution hit in 1984. He eventually made his mark by helping to explain how space could rip and tear, according to string theory. The Elegant Universe, a surprise best seller published in 1999, made him a celebrity on the pop-science circuit.
The idea of a television series came up after a producer had heard Greene lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first chapter of the story, "Einstein's Dream," traces humanity's quest for a unified view of the world, beginning with Isaac Newton's theory that the gravity holding things down on the ground is also responsible for keeping the planets and moons in their orbits.
Einstein embraced the dream of a unified theory, but, paradoxically, left science with a split view of the world. His general theory of relativity explained the shape of the cosmos but was mathematically incompatible with quantum mechanics, the strange rules that govern matter and atomic behavior that he had reluctantly helped invent.
But we can't have one theory for the universe and a different one for the matter inside it.
In the second segment, "String's the Thing," string theory comes to the rescue as a bridge between these warring poles of 20th-century physics. It had originally been invented as a theory of nuclear forces but had fallen from favor. The turning point was a heroic calculation in Aspen that stormy night in 1984 by John Schwarz of the California Institute of Technology and Michael Green, now at the University of Cambridge in England.
The theory of everything was at hand. The once lonely string theorists became a mob wooed by college physics departments and publishers alike. By the end of the 1980s there were five competing string theories, each claiming to be the Einsteinian grail, the alleged theory of everything.
How this state of affairs was resolved and the universe got even stranger is recounted in the last episode, "Welcome to the 11th Dimension." In a dramatic lecture in 1995, Edward Witten demonstrated that the multiple theories were each in fact different facets of a single underlying theory that he called M-theory, which requires 11 dimensions and allows for the existence of not just strings but multidimensional membranes - "branes" in the new cosmic jargon - that could be island universes. But nobody, not even Witten, claims to know what M-theory actually is.
"M stands for magic, mystery or matrix, according to taste," he says in the "11th Dimension" episode, then adds, "Some cynics have also occasionally suggested that M may also stand for murky, because our level of understanding of the theory is so primitive." ]
|