String theory simplified
As a so-called "Theory of Everything" candidate, string theory aims to address various
theoretical conundrums; the most fundamental of which is how gravity works for tiny
objects like electrons and photons. General relativity describes gravity as a reaction of
large objects, like planets, to curved regions of space, but theoretical physicists think
gravity should ultimately behave more like magnetism — fridge magnets stick because
their particles are swapping photons with fridge particles. Of the four forces in nature,
only gravity lacks this description from the perspective of small particles. Theorists can
predict what a gravity particle should look like, but when they try to calculate what
happens when two "gravitons" smash together, they get an infinite amount of energy
packed into a small space — a sure sign that the math is missing something.
One possible solution, which theorists borrowed from nuclear physicists in the 1970s, is
to get rid of the problematic, point-like graviton particles. Strings, and only strings, can
collide and rebound cleanly without implying physically impossible infinities.
"A one-dimensional object — that's the thing that really tames the infinities that come up
in the calculations," said Marika Taylor, a theoretical physicist at the University of
Southampton in England.
String theory turns the page on the standard description of the universe by replacing all
matter and force particles with just one element: Tiny vibrating strings that twist and turn
in complicated ways that, from our perspective, look like particles. A string of a
particular length striking a particular note gains the properties of a photon, and another
string folded and vibrating with a different frequency plays the role of a quark, and so on.
In addition to taming gravity, the framework proved attractive for its potential to explain
so-called fundamental constants like the electron's mass. The next step is to find the
right way to describe the folding and movement of strings, theorists hope, and
everything else will follow.
But that initial simplicity turned out to come at the cost of unexpected complexity —
string math didn't work in the familiar four dimensions (three of space and one of time).
It needed six additional dimensions (for a total of 10) visible only to the little strings, much
as a powerline looks like a 1D line to birds flying far overhead but a 3D cylinder to an
ant crawling on the wire. Adding to the conundrum, physicists had come up with five
conflicting string theories by the mid-1980s. The theory of everything was fractured.
Click here for more [Link] videos...
A more fundamental theory emerges
Over the next decade, scientists exploring the relationships between the five theories
began to find unexpected connections, which Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, gathered up and presented at a 1995
string theory conference at the University of Southern California. Witten argued that the
five string theories each represented an approximation of a more fundamental, 11-
dimensional theory in a particular situation, much as how Einstein’s space- and time-
bending theories of relativity match Newton’s description of objects moving at normal
speeds.
The novel theory is called M-theory, although to this day no one knows what
mathematical form it might take. The "M" is likely inspired by higher-dimensional objects
called membranes, Taylor said, but since the theory has no concrete mathematical
equations, the "M" remains a placeholder with no official meaning. "It was really a
parametrization of our ignorance," Taylor said. "This parent theory that would describe
absolutely everything."
Attempts to find those general equations that would work in every possible situation
made little progress, but the alleged existence of the fundamental theory gave theorists
the understanding and confidence needed to develop mathematical techniques for the
five versions of string theory and apply them in the right context. Strings are far too
small to detect with any conceivable technology, but one early theoretical success was
their ability to describe black hole entropy in 1996.
Entropy refers to the number of ways that you can arrange the parts of a system, but
without being able to see into the impenetrable depths of a black hole, no one knows
what type of particles might lie inside, or what arrangements they can take. And yet, in
the early 1970s Stephen Hawking and others showed how to calculate the entropy,
suggesting that black holes have some sort of internal structure. Most attempts to
describe the black hole’s makeup fall short, but tallying the configurations of
hypothetical strings does the trick. "String theory has been able to give a spot-on
counting," Taylor says, "not just roughly getting it right."
The string framework still faces many challenges, however: It produces an impossible
number of ways to fold up the extra dimensions that all seem to fit the broad features of
the Standard Model of particle physics, with little hope of distinguishing which is the
right one. Moreover, all of those models rely on an equivalence between force particles
and matter particles called supersymmetry that, like the extra dimensions, we don't
observe in our world. The models also don't seem to describe an expanding universe.
A number of physicists, such as Peter Woit of Columbia University, view these
divergences from reality as fatal flaws. "The basic problem with string theory unification
research is not that progress has been slow over the past 30 years," he wrote on his blog,
"but that it has been negative, with everything learned showing more clearly why the
idea doesn't work."
Taylor, however, maintains that today’s models are overly simplistic, and that features
like cosmological expansion and a lack of supersymmetry may someday be built into
future versions. Taylor expects that, while the new era of gravitational wave astronomy
may bring new tidbits of information about quantum gravity, more progress will be made
by continuing to follow the math deeper into string theory. "I have a theoretical bias,"
she said, "but I think the kind of breakthrough I'm describing would come from a
chalkboard; from thought."
