Every decade or so, a stunning breakthrough in string theory sends shock waves racing through the theoretical physics community, generating a feverish outpouring of papers and activity. This time, the Internet lines are burning up as papers keep pouring into the Los Alamos National Laboratory's computer bulletin board, the official clearing house for superstring papers. John Schwarz of Caltech, for example, has been speaking to conferences around the world proclaiming the "second superstring revolution." Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Prince- ton gave a spell-binding 3 hour lecture describing it. The after- shocks of the breakthrough are even shaking other disciplines, like mathematics. The director of the Institute, mathematician Phillip Griffiths, says, "The excitement I sense in the people in the field and the spinoffs into my own field of mathematics ... have really been quite extraordinary. I feel I've been very privileged to witness this first hand." http://www.mkaku.org/mtheory.html
Interesting link. Question: does string (or should I say M-string) theory delve into/deal with the Quantum world?
The article is pretty deep stuff. Quantum Mechanics and the Theory of Relativity are apparently the two big pillars of scientific foundation that M-theory apparently is beginning to link together. Unfortunately, if M-theory is true (or something like it), then the mysteries of this universe will pale in comparison to the much larger picture. If they ever discover that there are billions of universes, my brain will just burn out trying to fathom that level of complexity. If this universe is a subset of a larger realm of physics, then what do we call all things? The ultraverse? The polyverse?
Yes, but what kills me about reading this stuff is that I'm dying to see the mathematics behind it. While I appreciate the high-level summaries and commentary, I want to see exactly what they mean by equivalence, etc. I have the feeling that one cannot possibly appreciate all this w/o seeing some of the details. Next life I guess...
Billions of universes, or just one universe that goes on forever....both make one feel pretty small...
that is cool material, thanks for the link. my question is how one would differentiate between the universes ? different planes of reality, multi world theory--- if you are in one universe, reality,or world can you understand the other ?? best, surf
It might be like a man trying to understand woman and woman trying to understand men... We just might know but we don't realize it...
What I have read is that if there are alternate universes, then information cannot pass between any two of them. But maybe M-theory will modify that? What I cannot imagine is how anything can merge two seemingly disparate phenomenon as gravity and quantum mechanics. I'm sure that will be just as mind-blowing as the time discussions that follow from relativity (at the beginning of this thread). Another huge issue that will be very interesting: can quantum mechanics (on a practical level) only be applied at the sub-microscopic level as appears to be the case now?