Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
This book is perhaps the public debut of string theory – an attempt to explain how the best theories of the big and the small theories might be linked to explain the entire universe. The reason I think this is such a good book is that Greene does a very good job of explaining the current understanding physicists have of the universe. In other words I wanted to include a readable book about the universe.
Tell us about The Elegant Universe.
I’m a biologist, not a physicist or an astronomer, but these are both fundamentally important parts of science. Why the universe is here and what it’s made of, why light behaves as it does and why time travels: they are all fundamental questions. Most physicists can’t actually explain the theories of Einstein if you ask them. His theories of relativity are an attempt to explain the very big things in the universe. Is it expanding? How many galaxies are there? If there was a Big Bang are we sitting around now waiting for the Big Crunch? Then, at the other end of the spectrum, people are trying to understand the very small things in the universe – this is quantum theory. How energy and matter interact on a very small scale.
However, in the late part of the last century people started trying to put the two together but they wouldn’t go. This book is perhaps the public debut of string theory – an attempt to explain how the best of the big and the small theories might be linked to explain the entire universe. The reason I think this is such a good book is that Greene does a very good job of explaining the current understanding physicists have of the universe. In other words I wanted to include a readable book about the universe. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is a totally unreadable book so I couldn’t include it. Nobody has ever really understood it. Brian Greene’s book doesn’t suffer from this problem.
What is string theory?
String theory says, OK, the theory about the reason the universe viewed on a very small scale doesn’t line up with the universe viewed on a very large scale is because we’re looking at the small things as particles. But when you get very small, they stop behaving like particles. They do weird things like exist in two places at once. They don’t have enough dimensions for some of the other ideas in physics to work. So, to explain the whole universe you say they’re not particles at all, they’re wiggly bits of spaghetti. If you don’t see it as a particle but as a wiggly string then apparently it explains everything. Strings have 11 dimensions and the whole universe is made up of them so somehow this better allows them to obey Einstein’s explanations too. It allows for what we see out there to also fit in with the very, very small. It’s a mathematical fudge and a cop-out in some ways, but it’s the only theory we’ve got.
Right.
It’s I think it’s important because it’s about how science works. I’m not a mathematician – although I’m told the maths behind string theory is very elegant. However, the whole thing is a theoretical fudge and that’s what’s so exciting about it! This is how people’s brains have to work. To be a scientist you have to be creative and imaginative. Sure, science has its stamp collecting elements and attracts some quite boring types. But science doesn’t make the interesting people boring. These are really elegant, clever fudges! The main criticism of string theory is – it doesn’t deliver. Even though it comes close to explaining what might be going on in the universe it has failed to make a real prediction about how the universe behaves that can be tested by a scientific experiment. That’s about as major a problem as a scientific theory can have. One critic thought it so misguided and lacking in understanding that he borrowed an old physics put-down and described is as “not even wrong”. See Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong, 2006. We do need a better theory but nobody’s got one.
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Tom Clarke is Channel 4’s science correspondent. A scientist turned journalist, he has covered energy and the environment in the frozen North, met some of the world's most endangered whales threatened by oil exploration in Russia’s Far East, and followed the growing pains of the UK’s landmark Climate Change Bill. In 2007 Tom reported and presented a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation into the shadowy world of carbon offsetting. Most recently he was electrocuted (voluntarily) in Amsterdam in an attempt to explain an experiment designed to erase fearful memories.
I’m a biologist, not a physicist or an astronomer, but these are both fundamentally important parts of science. Why the universe is here and what it’s made of, why light behaves as it does and why time travels – they are all fundamental questions. Most physicists can’t actually explain the theories of Einstein if you ask them. His theories of relativity are an attempt to explain the very big things in the universe. Is it expanding? How many galaxies are there? If there was a Big Bang are we sitting around now waiting for the Big Crunch? Then, at the other end of the spectrum, people are trying to understand the very small things in the universe – quantum theory. How energy and matter interact on a very small scale.
However, in the late part of the last century people started trying to put the two together, but they wouldn’t go. This book is perhaps the public debut of string theory – an attempt to explain how the best of the big and the small theories might be linked to explain the entire universe. The reason I think this is such a good book is that Greene does a very good job of explaining the current understanding physicists have of the universe. In other words, it’s a readable book about the universe. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is a totally unreadable book so I couldn’t include it. Nobody has ever really understood it. Brian Greene’s book doesn’t suffer from this problem.
What is string theory?
String theory says: OK, the theory about the reason the universe viewed on a very small scale doesn’t line up with the universe viewed on a very large scale is because we’re looking at the small things as particles. But when you get very small, they stop behaving like particles. They do weird things like exist in two places at once. They don’t have enough dimensions for some of the other ideas in physics to work. So, to explain the whole universe you say they’re not particles at all, they’re wiggly bits of spaghetti. If you don’t see it as a particle but as a wiggly string then apparently it explains everything. Strings have 11 dimensions and the whole universe is made up of them, so somehow this better allows them to obey Einstein’s explanations too. It allows for what we see out there to also fit in with the very, very small. It’s a mathematical fudge and a cop-out in some ways, but it’s the only theory we’ve got.
Right.
I think it’s important because it’s about how science works. I’m not a mathematician – although I’m told the maths behind string theory is very elegant. However, the whole thing is a theoretical fudge and that’s what’s so exciting about it! This is how people’s brains have to work. To be a scientist you have to be creative and imaginative. Sure, science has its stamp collecting elements and attracts some quite boring types. But science doesn’t make the interesting people boring. These are really elegant, clever fudges.
The main criticism of string theory is – it doesn’t deliver. Even though it comes close to explaining what might be going on in the universe, it has failed to make a real prediction about how the universe behaves that can be tested by a scientific experiment. That’s about as major a problem as a scientific theory can have. One critic thought it so misguided and lacking in understanding that he borrowed an old physics put-down and described is as “not even wrong”. We do need a better theory, but nobody’s got one.
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