STRING THEORY

Henry Bernatowicz
What Is String Theory?
Strings are all around you. Your clothes are made of strings woven into cloth. Spider webs are string. To
physicists, who study energy and matter, a string is anything much longer than it is wide. The cables that
hold up suspension bridges are strings even though they are six inches thick. Some people collect string and
wind it in a ball. No one knows why. A scientist would even call your DNA a string, though it curls up and
those curls curl up and so on. Your DNA stretched out like a string would be a few meters long. To a
mathematician a string has no width, only length. Scientists are beginning to believe that absolutely
everything, from stars to cotton candy, may be made of string, very tiny mathematicians string. This is
string theory.
String theory is very weird, more than you can imagine. It involves higher dimensions and other universes.
Vibrating strings make up everything. Everything is chunky and fuzzy when you look at it close enough.
You can still hear and see the Big Bang that started the universe. Black holes are hairy. Is dark energy
making you lose weight? Is dark chocolate matter making you gain weight? Instead of using the dog-ate-my-
homework excuse, try this one. I left it in the eighth dimension.
String theory is the first theory of physics that tries to explain everything. What does it mean to explain
everything? We would know how the universe began and where it is going. A theory of everything would
explain everything we feel, see, or measure. We would understand all the forces and all types of matter. We
would know what is most basic and how everything else is composed of these basic parts. Could the
universe have been different? Are there other universes? A theory of everything should answer these
questions. Every big scientific discovery changes how we think about our purpose and ourselves. String
theory is the biggest, most exciting change that ever happened in science.
As you read, you will find this symbol looking like a wiggly string. It means, pause here and answer a
question or think about what you just read. I dont know or understand, can be your answer, but it is more
fun to guess. Answers will come as you read more. You will also sometimes find a String Break!
This is a way to relax before plunging further into string theory. String breaks contain forgettable facts about
strings. Finally, there are quotes from Albert Einstein. He was the worlds most famous scientist, recognized
as the most important man of the 20th century. All his life he had trouble with his hair. This led him to
discover several hairdos: the afro, the cotton ball, and spiked hair. Here he is in wilting spiked hair with the
first quote.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. A. Einstein
To understand string theory we have to know about some of the discoveries of the last century. Science
almost never says that an old theory is wrong. Scientists test a theory every way they can imagine. If it
passes the tests, the theory is true for all the stuff tested. If it does not pass, then you modify the theory. The
old theories were carefully tested. That means string theory has to give the same results. It may not replace
many theories. It will mostly add to them or pull together different looking parts into a whole. That is why
we have to know what was happening in physics before string theory. String theory depends on the theories
of the 20th century.
Big Numbers and Small Numbers
To understand physics, it helps to be comfortable with big and small numbers. Science gives most of its
results as numbers. We are going to discuss everything from strings, much smaller than an atomic nucleus,
to the whole universe. Scientists have a way to give an estimate of the sizes of things. They round the
number to the nearest power of ten and just keep track of the number of zeros in an exponent, a little number
to the upper right of the ten. For example, in this notation, 822 to the nearest power of ten is 1000 or 10 +3 in
the shorthand. There are three zeros in 1000. The number 147 is closer to 100 than 1000 so it is 10+2.
There is a similar trick for small numbers. A proton is about 0.000000000000001 meters. That is 14 zeros
and a 1 after the decimal point. If you wrote it as a fraction, it would be 1/1,000,000,000,000,000. One
divided by a one followed by 15 zeros. That is small. It is one quadrillionth. In shorthand, it is 10 -15 meters,
our small number. The minus sign tells us the number is less than one and the number zeros you would need
to write it as a fraction.

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A billion is one followed by nine zeros. A trillion is one followed by twelve zeros. A quadrillion is one
followed by fifteen zeros. Other Western languages use trillion and quadrillion but they have different
values. Our quadrillion is the British trillion. In exponential notation, everyone agrees. The table shows that
the exponential notation is neat, simple, and easy to read.
Three Ways to Write Large and Small Numbers
10-30 0.0000000000000000000000000000001 One quadrillionth of a quadrillionth
10-8 0.00000001 Ten trillionths
100 1.0 One
10+10 10,000,000,000 Ten billions
10+41 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 100 billion quadrillion quadrillions
000, 000,000,000,000,000
Big things are very big and small things are very small. The number of bacteria end-to-end it would take to
cross the universe is almost the same as the number of strings it would take to be as long as a bacterium.
The biggest things are huge. Humans and our piece of the universe are insignificant judging by size alone.
We are only aware of the things that are near our size, about a meter. Bacteria, 10 -5
meters long cause strep throat. Your fingertip can just barely detect an edge that size. One of the biggest
things in our environment is a skyscraper, 10+3 meters. That gives a range of sizes in our piece of the
universe of about eight powers of ten. A skyscraper is 10 +8, or 100,000,000 times bigger than a bacterium.
This is just a tiny slice of the universe that covers 61 powers of 10. The universe is 10 +61 times bigger than
the smallest thing, a string. String theory aims to explain it all.
The number to the upper right of the ten, the exponent, tells the story. Negative exponents mean small
numbers. Positive exponents mean big numbers. The larger the number in the exponent, the bigger the
number is if it is a positive exponent. The larger a negative exponent is, smaller the number is. The range of
sizes of parts of the universe is amazing.
How BIG and How Small Things Are
String Proton Atom Bacteria Kid Earth Solar System Milky Way Universe
10-35 10-15
10-11 10-5 1 10+8
10+13
10+21 10+26 meters
Science explores the wonders of the universe we cannot directly see. To study the very large we have
telescopes, satellites, and space probes. For the very small there are microscopes. The electron microscope
can detect individual atoms. Is there anything smaller? There sure is. Atoms are made of elementary
particles. To see that small we need a different tool, particle accelerators, once called atom smashers.
Elementary particles contain strings. The strings of string theory are the smallest things that can exist in the
universe. We will never see them, but they explain all there is. String theory is a theory of everything, but it
is not the first. We will look next at some of the oldest theories of everything.
Myths and Creation Stories
Men and women have always been curious. We want to know who we are, where we came from, how the
world began, and why the world is the way it is. We do not know what life was like for cave dwellers. They
could not write. They left behind little more than their bones. Therefore, this is just a guess. For cave
dwellers, these questions were answered by the strongest one in the tribe, later by the holiest, and then by the
smartest. The questioning led first to myths, then religions, and to science. The first idea was that gods and
other supernatural beings lived in everything: trees, animals, stars, water, and sky. This idea is still found in
the most isolated and primitive tribes.
Cave dwellers had a hard life, with little time for thinking. They were constantly searching for their next
meal and hiding from saber tooth tigers and other nasty animals. Eventually, they learned how to hunt,
protect themselves, and grow some food. Then a new thing happened, spare time. They had spare time but
no video games. What should they do? What would you do? Cavemen began to play, explore, observe,
think, ask questions about the world, and make art. This happened about 40,000 years ago. Their biggest
questions were the same as ours. Why am I here? Why is the world as it is? About 10,000 years ago, men
started developing complex myths and the first religions. We are going to learn about some of these before
we tackle science.

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Even before we got smart enough to carefully observe nature, we wanted an explanation of how humans and
the world began. Here are the stories of some ancient peoples. While you are reading, try to notice errors or
holes, something not explained, in these stories. Is the story more complicated than what it tries to explain?
Australian Aborigines
The ancient people of Australia believe that the Earth started bare and flat but many things slept under the
Earth including their ancestors. The ancestors woke up and wandered around the Earth in strange forms,
sometimes animal, sometimes plant, and often all mixed up and missing parts. Two beings popped into
existence out of nothing, they were the Ungambikula. Wandering the world, they found half-made human
beings everywhere. They took great stone knives and carved all the badly formed part humans into real
humans.
What do you think of this story? Does it leave a lot not explained? What are some holes? Where did those
ancestors in the ground come from? Can things pop into existence out of nothing? Surprise! Modern
physics found that strings could pop into existence out of nothing.
Chinese
Phan Ku hatched from a giant cosmic egg. He pushed half the shell above him as the sky, the other half
below him was the Earth. He grew taller each day for 18,000 years, gradually pushing the pieces apart until
they reached the correct places. After all this effort, Phan Ku fell apart. His limbs become the mountains, his
blood the rivers, his breath the wind and his voice the thunder. His eyes are the sun and the moon. The fleas
in his hair became human beings. Ugh!
Greek
This myth is more recent than the others are and is more complex. All is emptiness, except for two things,
Nyx, a bird with black wings, and the wind. Nyx laid a golden egg, and for ages she sat on it. Finally, life
began to stir in the egg and out came Eros, god of love. One-half of the shell rose into the air and became the
sky. Eros made Nyx and the wind fall in love. They had many children who were giant gods, the Titans. The
Titans had children and grandchildren, who were normal sized. They were afraid of the grandchildren.
Cronus decided to protect himself. He swallowed his grandchildren when they were still infants. Ugh! Zeus
hid and was not swallowed. He made Cronus barf up his brothers and sisters. Double ugh! They battled the
Titans and took over. Soon the Earth was looking good but without humans and animals. Zeus told his sons
to go to Earth, make them, and give each a gift like speed, the ability to swim, or camouflage. One son used
up all the gifts making the animals. The other, Prometheus, had nothing to give to humans, so he gave them
fire. This made Zeus mad. Earth was like the Garden of Eden, and fire gave man too much power. Zeus got
even by giving Pandora a pretty box she was never to open. Of course she did, releasing wars, sickness,
skinned knees, and playground bullies.
Are you glad we got fire even though we got all the troubles in Pandoras Box? Notice how much you
have to accept to believe this story. Do you have to accept more than it explains?
Iroquois Indians
They believed that at first there was only an island in the sky, where the sky people lived. Maybe it was a
flying saucer. No one died and no one was born. Then a sky woman discovered she was going to have twin
sons. Her husband got mad and threw her out of the sky. Kids would change things. She fell down to the
water covering the Earth where animals caught her and made her a place by spreading mud on a giant
turtles back. The mud grew big as North America. One son was good and one evil. They created the rest of
the Earth. They made animals and humans. The bad son made all the bad things like bones in fish, thorns
around roses, winter without snow, and poison ivy.

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 Where did the sky people come from? Many other creation myths have the world
created by opposites such as good/bad, man/woman, creative/destructive.
Hindu
According to the story, an elephant supports the world. But, someone asked what
holds up the elephant? A turtle. What supports the turtle? A bigger turtle. Well, what
supports that turtle? After that, its turtles all the way down. This story illustrates
how an explanation may not explain anything but just puts off having to answer the
real question.

Bible
God took seven days. He created light and separated it from darkness. A
separation of light and darkness happens in the Big Bang. Then he made the rest of
the world. Man was last. He started with just Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden.
God said do not eat the fruit of a certain tree, but of course, they did. That was like
Pandoras Box, and since then we have had a hard time. They had to leave paradise
and populate the Earth.
Which creation story do you like best? What story seems most true to you? Imagine that science never
happened. You might believe the world is on an elephant on a stack of turtles and that your ancestors were
fleas in a giants hair. The story of string theory is going to seem even stranger to you.
Physics Begins with Astronomy
Science started about 2000 years ago with the first tries at biology, astronomy, and medicine. Physical
science, study of non-living things, started 500 years later. There were reasons for the slow start. Science
was confused with magic and witchcraft and religion opposed it. In addition, science demands
concentration, time, and record keeping. All were in short supply several thousand years ago. The first
physical science was astronomy. Astronomy was important because it could predict the seasons and tell
when to start planting. Many civilizations built monuments like Stonehenge to tell the seasons.
The Greeks and later the Christians thought the Earth was imperfect. There was hunger, disease, and death.
However, the stars looked perfect. They were little twinkling points of light that moved smoothly across the
heavens with the seasons. Anyone looking up on a dark night could see that the stars circled the Earth. The
Greeks decided the sun and stars hung on a moving glass sphere with the flat Earth at the center. The sphere
was the Greek ideal of perfection. This model of the universe was beautiful and simple. Then someone
noticed that a few stars moved at different speeds. The Greeks called them planets, meaning wanderers.
They decided they could still keep the heavens neat if the each planet moved on a different glass sphere. The
spheres moved in perfect circles around the Earth. They even had a phrase to describe this perfection, the
music of the spheres. Not the kind of music you hear with your ears.
As observations got more accurate and covered more years, the Greeks found that this did not work. The
planets sometimes moved backwards and then went forwards again. Ptolemy, a mathematician, developed
the most sophisticated model of the motions of the Earth-centered solar system. He was great at algebra and
geometry. That was all the math Greeks knew.
In order to follow the details of planetary motions, his model was very complex. He could fix things up if
the planets stuck to smaller glass spheres that rolled around outside the original planetary spheres. The
original glass spheres also had to shift off center from the Earth. Even that did not quite work so he ended up
with 39 spheres. The sun still circled the Earth. The glass sphere approach was beginning to look cracked.
Why didnt someone ask where all that glass came from? What is holding up the flat Earth? Those are two
holes in that theory. You know much more science than all the ancient Greeks combined.

Copernicus finally got it right. He put the sun at the center and the model simplified. Religion, however,
favored Ptolemys view of the heavens and did not want to hear anything else. What do you think of
religions trying to block the facts of astronomy? Which is the better theory Ptolemy, or Copernicus? If
they both accurately fit observations, which is the better theory? Hurray, if you chose Copernicus.
Scientists have a profound faith in the beauty and simplicity of the world. They believe that the worlds
beauty should show in the beauty and simplicity of their theories. They also have faith in math. Some
Greeks thought mathematics was abstract perfection.

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 This look at early astronomy
shows how science works. Make a
theory from the first available data
stars and planets move smoothly
across the sky. Test it by more
observations. Planets move
differently. Use math, the language
of science. If it fits the theory, that
is great. If not, try for a better
theory. The Greeks added more
glass spheres resulting in a very
complex theory. Copernicus
moved the sun to the center.
Copernicuss theory was more accurate and much simpler than the Greeks model. Sometimes the new data
is something we missed; sometimes a new piece of equipment gives data never imagined. Galileo made the
telescope. With it, he could see moons of Jupiter, and the phases of Venus. This made him certain that the
Earth circled the sun. New data and striving for simplicity makes a better theory.
Classical Physics
At the start of science, the basic stuff of the universe was the four ancient elements Earth, wind, fire, and
water. Different mixes of these four elements made everything. We still describe people by the properties of
these four elements. He has a fiery temper. Nice people go with the flow. Classical physics began with
machines and mechanics, the science of motion. This included the motions of the planets and stars. Classical
physics is the period 1700-1900. Before classical physics, there was not a good theory of matter.
Classical science discovered the 92 modern elements and their atoms. If you started dividing a little bit of
gold smaller and smaller, you could not get a piece of gold smaller than a gold atom. Atoms made
everything. Atoms were the smallest things that could exist. They were hard little balls, a different ball for
each of the elements.
The greatest classical physicist was Newton. Around 1700, he discovered three laws of motion. The first is
the law of inertia; objects do not change speed or direction unless acted on by a force. The second law says
that if there is a force on an object, it changes the speed, causing a constant acceleration. The third says
every action has an equal but opposite reaction. The laws of motion applied to every moving thing. Other
scientists were beginning to understand parts of this but Newton put it all together. Newtons laws helped the
industrial revolution happen. Gravity and the electromagnetic force are two of the fundamental forces string
theory unifies.
Newtons Law of Gravitation
His other big accomplishment was the law of gravitation. It says there is an attractive force between any two
objects that have mass. It also tells us how to calculate the gravitational force. Before Newton, there was not
even a word for gravity. Newton had to invent it. We walked around on the Earth because that is how it is.
We stand on the ground. If there were, something holding us down, no one could imagine it could also hold
the Earth around the sun, no one except Newton. The Greeks and Copernicus made models that duplicated
the movements of the stars and planets. They did not know why they moved. Newton provided that answer.
There was not another scientist as great as Newton until Darwin in the 1800s. Darwins work with evolution
provided the framework for the study of living things like Newton did for non-living.
Newton had to develop a new math, calculus, to describe the motions of machines, falling objects, planets,
and clocks. Calculus is about position, speed, time, and acceleration. If you know some of these, calculus
lets you figure out the others. It is even more powerful. If you know physics and the starting positions and
velocities of the planets, for example, then with calculus and Newtons laws you can calculate their positions
and velocities for any time in the distant future or in the past. When Newton applied mechanics, the study of
motion, to the planets, he found that their orbits never were circles. They travel in an ellipse, a squashed
circle.
He came up with an equation to describe the force of gravity between two masses. Objects feel this force
even when they do not touch, even when they are all the way across the solar system, even all the way

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across the universe. Fields are forces that work without contact. Every mass surrounds itself with a
gravitational field of force. Iron filings and a magnet show the magnetic field.
[Figure force field, illustration] Nobody understood forces until Newton. He also determined how bodies
responded to force. This defined inertia and acceleration. Then with a simple equation and calculus, Newton
could predict the orbits of planets. A mathematician in Newtons time was studying curves, looking at
position, slope, and change of slope, which are similar to position, velocity, and acceleration that Newton
was studying. Frequently science and math develop together. Sometimes math is ahead, sometimes science.
Newton wrote this equation for the force of gravity between two masses:
F = GmM / R2
F is the force of gravity; m is the light mass; M is the heavy mass; R is the distance apart; G is a constant,
the gravitational field strength.
Do not be afraid of equations. They just say that the left side equals the right side. They are just shorthand
for how to calculate something. Scientists usually leave out the, multiplication signs between two variables.
If variables are next to each other, like mM, it means multiply these two masses. This equation says to
calculate the force of attraction between a mass m (you for example) and a larger mass M (the Earth),
multiply the masses, divide by the separation squared R2, or R times R. The separation is the distance
between you and the center of the Earth. Then multiply the result by the gravitational force constant G, a
number. If you do that, then you have figured out the numerical force of gravity, F, on you. If you put in the
actual numbers for the symbols G, m, M, and R, you would find that the force on you, F, is your weight. It is
interesting that you pull on the Earth as hard as it pulls on you. That is Newtons law of action-reaction. The
Earth is too heavy to notice.
The equation tells us gravity gets stronger if the masses are heavier. What happens if the masses get closer?
R gets smaller; the force is stronger. The closer the masses are, the stronger the attraction. In fact, if R = 0,
the force is infinite. That can only happen if the masses have zero radiuses.
In 20th century physics, theoretical physicists treated elementary particles, protons and neutrons, as if they
are points. Their radius is zero, but they have mass. Zero radius means they can get so close that their
separation is zero so R = 0. No matter what the numerator GmM is, divide it by zero and the result is ,
infinite. Is the gravitational force between elementary particles infinite? Do you believe it? In the real
world, values of measurements can equal zero but they cannot be infinite. Only string theory solves this
problem. It took three paragraphs to explain Newtons equation for gravity. This is why physicists like math
and equations. With a glance, they can understand all the above and more.
How big is infinity? Think of the biggest number you can. Then multiply it by itself. Do that ten times and
you are still nowhere near infinity. Subtract the biggest number you can think of from infinity and the result
is still infinity. All you can say about infinity is that its bigger than that. Here is another example. If you
throw dice, there is a chance that the dice will stop with snake eyes, both sides with one dot up. On average,
snake eyes turn up one time in 24. If everyone on earth rolled dice, what is the chance of all rolling snake
eyes? It is impossibly smallnever in a billion years. What if everyone rolled an infinite number of times?
How many times would all snake eyes appear? All snake eyes would occur an infinite number of times. No,
that does not mean it happens every time. This is like a bunch of monkeys typing at random for a long
enough time. One of them would type a whole Shakespeare play at random. Another would type the whole
play but misspell The End as The E%$##. One would start it off by typing a Play by YOUR NAME.
There is a lot of room in infinity for nearly everything you can imagine. Things get strange when you are
dealing with infinity. xxstopped
Infinity was not a problem for Newton. He did not know and could not imagine anything with a zero radius.
For him everything had a size, from a speck of dust to Jupiter, all non-zero. Therefore, for him the separation
between the centers of two objects could never be zero. We will soon look at some physics that sometimes
gives infinity for exactly this reason. To a physicist infinity usually means he did not just make a mistake, he
made a BIG mistake.
String Break! Native people in Asia, Australia, Africa, the Arctic, the Americas, and the Pacific
discovered the fun of playing with a loop of string to make designs. This one is flock of birds, from the
South Pacific. Some designs are ancient. There are over 2000 designs. Why did people do this?
They didnt have entertainment so they had a lot of time on their hands, which turned into string on their
hands. Cats Cradle is a game, played with a loop of string, where one person makes a pattern. Then
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another lifts the string into a new pattern. String theorists do this while waiting for their computer to finish
a calculation. You can find out more about string loop patterns at http://www.isfa.org/.

Electricity and Magnetism

Newton pretty much settled the study of motion. Later, other scientists tried to understand electricity and
magnetism. Classical physics discovered electricity and also discovered magnetism but at first did not
understand them. Physics knew of three forces. They were gravity, electricity, and magnetism. At first,
electricity and magnetism were only good for impressing your friends by making their hair stand on end.
In the late 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell found equations that explained electricity and magnetism and
showed that they are different views of the same thing. There are four Maxwells equations. They are
complex, relating currents and charges to electric and magnetic fields and how they vary with distance and
with time. The equations say that moving electricity, a current, generates a magnetic field. That is how
loudspeakers work. A moving magnetic field generates a current of electricity. That is how a car alternator
works.
Maxwell discovered that one solution of his equations was a wave that could travel through empty space.
This was something that popped out of the math, but was totally unknown and unexpected. What do you
think physicists did? Did they send him to remedial math? Try for a theory that did not predict silly things?
Use the equations for everything else? Physicists did not do anything like that. They started looking for
those waves. They believed the equations more than experience or common sense. They were right.
Experimenters made radio waves and showed that they moved through empty space. Not only that, light is
also a wave of electricity and magnetism.
The Missing Paper Caper
Physics is the most complex science. It is the study of matter and energy. Matter can range from the particles
inside an atom to all the matter in the universe. How do physics and the other sciences work? Is it different
from myth? Science relies on observation, experiments, and confirming predictions. Myths rely on faith in
peoples thought, feelings, and imagination.
Sometimes there are two or more explanations when something happens. For example, your teacher wants
you to take a book to the library. When you come back, your book report is gone (observation one).
Courtney tells you that three crows flew into the room, shredded your paper, and flew away with it to make
a nest (theory one). James tells you that Courtney took it (theory two). You remember that the window was
closed (observation two), but Courtney says the teacher opened it because it was hot. This explanation added
to theory one to explain contradictory observation two.
What do you think of Courtneys explanation? Courtneys story is complicated. Like a scientist, you think
about predictions of Courtneys story and observe if the predictions are true. If the window was open, it
should still be open (prediction one). It is not. If crows were in the room, there should be feathers or paper
shreds on the floor (prediction two). None are visible. Courtney says someone cleaned up and closed the
window. This is theory three which improves theory two by adding cleanup. Looking around, you see that
no one has a book report. Since no one else has their report, you decide that the teacher took yours too
(theory four). Later the teacher asks you for your paper and you now have data that contradicts theory four.
You decide Courtney took it (theory two). If she took your paper, it should be nearby (prediction three).
Looking at her desk, you see the corner of your paper sticking out of her books. Case solved, theory two is
correct.
In science, there are often several theories as there were for the missing paper. A theory must match current
data. It should make good predictions and there should be a way to show it is wrong. Theory one made bad
predictions, no feathers, or paper shreds. That was fixed by making the theory more complicated, adding the
clean up. What if two theories make good predictions and fit the current information, like theories two,
three, and four did for a while? What should you do then? Pick the simple one. The simplest theory is the
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one that has the fewest assumptions, and depends on the least number of unproven facts. If you picked the
simplest, you would have correctly decided on theory two.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. A. Einstein
Courtney took the paper. Why pick the simple one? Let Courtney convince you why. She still wants you to
believe her crow theory. She says she followed the crows and climbed up a tree to get the paper back. She
glued it neatly together and put it between her books to squash it flat. Now do you believe her? Courtneys
story gets more and more complex. Explanations often become more complex in order to try to save a
broken theory.
Which Came First? Chicken or Egg, Math or Science
Math is important to science because science often begins with measurements and numbers, as the most
important information. More importantly, the universe seems to follows mathematical rules. Isnt that
amazing? We could live in a universe where one day the sky is clear blue and the next day it has purple
polka dots. One day you go outside and you are taller than the trees, and your dog turned into a blue hippo.
Our world is very orderly. [Figure James tall see sneakers house from elevated point of view and blue hippo
dog, drawing] Things do not change without reason. Things are so normal that measurements agree day-to-
day, century-to-century all over the Earth and the universe, done by different scientists. When measurements
do change, the change is orderly and predictable using math. This is the reason math and science need each
other.
Newton came up with the theory of gravitation. Without math his theory would have been: Planets attract
each other. That is not a theory that could get a man to the moon. Newton needed to develop calculus,
which could deal with speed, position, and acceleration. Mathematicians discovered the math Einstein
needed for general relativity, math for warped space, before he even started work. The same thing happened
with string theory. Mathematicians developed much of the math before the physicists got going.
Math is abstract. You start with a set of objects, operations, and rules. The objects do not have to be
numbers, they can be spaces, geometrical forms, any idea mathematicians can imagine. The most familiar
set of objects are the numbers and the operations of add, subtract, multiply and divide. All of mathematics
follows from a small set of rules called axioms.
Mathematicians care about math and are not concerned that their work corresponds to reality. For example,
they consider objects where a + b does not equal b + a. They also invented imaginary numbers. Complex
variable math deals with imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers come from taking the square root of
negative numbers. Mathematicians worked out how they should add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and how
to handle numbers that are part normal and part imaginary. Some equations have solutions that are
imaginary or part imaginary, part real. Mathematicians did this work for the pure joy of solving an
interesting problem. Most mathematicians do not care whether their work applies to the real world or not.
Some do not even leave their office for a week. Complex variables turned out to be necessary to analyze
periodic motion like waves. Again, math turns out to describe how the universe works. This is true many,
many times even though mathematicians were not heading in that direction. Even Einstein could not figure it
out. What do you think? Just how can ideas that start in a mathematicians imagination lead to detailed
explanations of the world?
How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of
experience, is so admirably adapted to the objects of reality? A. Einstein
Science is public. Results are public. Anyone can find the latest research on the Internet. Scientists check
results, reproduce, and reinterpret. Significant things get hundreds of checkers. Predictions are very
important because a clever scientist or Courtney could bend or invent a theory to fit old data. No one can
fudge data that does not yet exist. Philosophers and scientists agree that a theory needs to have a way to
prove it is true. This could be as dramatic as setting off the first atomic bomb to prove that nuclear physics
was correct. Many philosophers and scientists also believe every theory should also have a way to prove that
it is wrong.
That brings up an embarrassing subject. There is a nasty duck on your head! It is angry and it is stomping on
your head. It is invisible so no one can see it. There is no way to detect it. It is like magic. It is weightless,
invisible, not affected by any force, silent, and it is on your head. You know what ducks do besides quack.
Can you prove the duck is not there? There is no way to prove it is there or not there because of the magic

8
way it affects nothing, but its there. You may think I am lying or joking. Can you prove there is not an
invisible duck on your head right now? Yes, your head. No, you cannot.
Scientists would say the duck is nonsense. Existence of the duck is impossible to prove. To a scientist,
something that cannot be proven true or false is not part of science. The duck idea does not lead to any
predictions, because it does not affect anything. There is no way to prove that the duck isnt there. People
have made up millions of such beliefs and many more will follow. Science deals only with ideas that can be
proven one way or the other. This is important for string theory. So far, there is no way to prove it is true or
false.
In this information age, many other sources of information: politicians, advertisers, preachers, songs, videos,
the Internet, cults, and blogs constantly bombard us. Are they as reliable as science? Should we apply to
these sources of information some of the rules of science?
The Mechanical Universe
At the end of the 1800s Maxwell discovered that electricity and magnetism were one force, the
electromagnetic force. Physicists then knew of only two forces, electromagnetic and gravity. Newtons laws
were marvelous in understanding the motion of everything from pendulums to planets. Physicists began to
feel confident that they knew just about everything. Men built fine clocks and large complex machines. The
universe was neat and tidy. Everything in it moved like clockwork. Some physicists thought they were near
the end of the exciting physics. The patent offices could close. Physicists would need new jobs. Some
wondered if they could get on American Idol. It turns out there was more than enough to keep them working
through the 20th century.
Classical theory was close to a theory of everything. Newton could calculate the positions, velocities, and
accelerations of the planets for any time in the future or any time in the past. He did not even have a laptop.
The model of the universe was the clock. People could imagine that everything moved in an orderly and
predictable way. Forces happened and calculus let us determine the result. Classical physics let men build
and understand machines, pumps, pipes, pressure, steam engines, autos, airplanes, levers, pulleys, gases,
ships and much more. Success made scientists optimistic and confident. To predict the planets paths all you
had to know was their initial velocity and position. The model for atoms was tiny hard balls. Therefore, the
atomic world was just like a game of pool. Classical mechanics worked for pool so why not for atoms.
According to classical physics, the past and future could be determined if we knew where all the atoms or
pool balls were now and their velocities. It was as if the universe were a clock; wind it up and away it goes
in a neat predictable way.
Even living things like bacteria are complicated tiny machines, containing smaller, complex machines. The
machines inside are just too tiny to see. Recent work in molecular biology agrees that a cell is a combination
of many molecule-sized machines. Genes are the control system turning on cell-sized machines when
needed. If bacteria are machines, then maybe animals are machines. Animals are just a large number of cells.
Newtons laws apply to all parts from the atoms on up. Biological processes were due to the interactions of
hard little atom balls that joined up to make molecules, that joined to make cells, and all exerted forces on
each other. That sounds mechanical. The internal molecular machines had to follow the same Newtons
laws. Can you see where we are going with this? Animals would be mechanical devices just like a clock
only more complicated. We are animals so we also are very complicated mechanical devices. This made
many uneasy because there was no room for soul or mind. Worse, the future of mechanical devices is
determined by their past. There is no sin, no free will. The ultimate statement of classical physics was that
given the initial velocity and positions of everything, you could calculate the fate of the universe. What do
you think of this idea? Why? Do you feel like a robot with your life determined by physics?
Physicists now know that the above series of generalizations from planets to pool balls to people goes too
far. A thing can be greater than the sum of its parts. We are made of a few chemicals and a lot of water but
you would not expect a few gallons of water and some chemicals to drive a car or write a symphony.
Complexity theory studies how some simple things and simple rules can lead to things as complex as living
things. Chaos theory studies how complex things like the global weather changes and how even a small
event, a butterfly flying, can change the course of a storm.
Space and time were simple, an unchanging framework where everything happened. Physicists took them
for granted. Everyone could agree on the meaning of time and space. Newtons laws of motion and gravity
applied to everything in the universe. There were only two forces, gravity and electromagnetic. After

9
classical physics, the most interesting research was of parts of the universe that we do not experience every
day. They were things that were either huge or very small.
In 1900, there were just two problems handled incorrectly by classical physics. These were a small part of
physics, and someone would figure it out. The first problem was that physicists could not measure the speed
of the Earth through space. They got zero. That meant the Earth was standing still. Therefore, it had to be at
the center of the universe since all the stars were moving. Were Copernicus and Galileo wrong? The solution
to this problem changed our understanding of the large things in the universe and the universe itself. Second,
when physicists calculated the color of hot objects, it came out wrong. That did not seem to be a big
problem. This problem changed understanding of the atomic world and reality to its roots. The solution of
both these problems profoundly changed our view of reality and of measurement. This, of course, had a
large impact on string theory which was to follow..
Relativity
Einstein was a clerk at a patent office, but he followed the latest news in physics. He knew about the speed
of the Earth experiment. He knew we were not at the center of the universe. He started thinking about it.
That got him to thinking about how different observers see the same thing. This began the theory of
relativity.
When you sit with a nice girl [boy] for two hours, it seems like two minutes. Thats relativity.
A. Einstein
It is true that your point of view, your surroundings, who you are, who you are with and what you are doing
all affect how you see and interpret things. This is the relativity that psychology studies. Einstein thought
most about how observers moving at high speed past each other on rockets would see things. This was one
of his famous thought experiments. Let us do our own thought experiment about relativity.
Relativity Baseball
You are in a softball game against the Blue Meanies. They always play dirty. For this game, their pitcher is
riding on a four-wheeler. [Figure 4-wheeler baseball, drawing] Coach Nozair says, Theres nothing in the
rules against pitching from a four-wheeler. If its not forbidden, its allowed.
Your coach, Mr. Whimper, agrees! The game is for the championship. Their pitcher does not have a fastball.
In the game, he drives the four-wheeler out near second base and guns it toward home. As the four-wheeler
crosses the mound, he throws the ball. It has wicked fast. He then puts the four-wheeler in reverse and drives
backward back to second base.
Between innings, you hear their pitcher telling Nozair, My pitch is still slow coach. It doesnt look any
faster to me.
Nozair replies, Do you have a banana for a brain? Of course, it looks the same to you. Relative to you the
ball always has the speed you throw it. Relative to the batter, the speed of the four-wheeler adds to the speed
you throw. That way, all your pitches are fast.
The score is tied. You are at bat. Bases loaded. The count is three and two. Their pitcher decides to be cute
and surprise you by throwing the ball early. He has to pitch from the mound, but he does it while he crosses
the mound speeding backwards to second. He throws and the pitch rolls slowly toward second. It never
reaches home plate. Your team wins. What happened? The vehicle speed was opposite to the direction of
the pitch speed. To get the speed relative to the batter, subtract the vehicle speed from the pitch speed. Since
the four-wheeler was going faster than he could pitch, the ball rolls away from the plate. You walk and that
pushes in a run so your team wins.
Einstein became the worlds most famous scientist by doing thought experiments about relativity like the
one we did. Our analysis of the softball game is correct. The speed of the four-wheeler adds to the speed of
the ball. When the four-wheeler is moving opposite to the direction of the ball, it subtracts from the speed of
the ball.
How Fast Is the Earth Moving?
Since it worked for baseball, it was natural to assume that a light pulse fired in different directions from a
moving body would travel at different speeds. At the start of the twentieth century, several physicists
decided to determine the speed of the Earth through the universe. Mirrors split a light beam and sent it along
two perpendicular directions. Mirrors reflected it back to a point to a compare their speeds. The apparatus
could very accurately determine the time to travel the identical arms. [Figure Earth speed measurement,
illustration]
10
The earth was moving so they expected that the time along one arm would not equal the time on the other. In
the ball game, this is like comparing the speed of a pitch to the speed of a pick-off throw to first base. The
four-wheeler speed speeds up pitches to the plate. The speed of a pitch to first is just the normal slow speed
because the four-wheeler is not moving toward or away from first base. The pitch to the plate is faster than
the throw to first by the speed of the four-wheeler. They predicted that the light going in the direction of the
Earths motion would take a different time than that aimed perpendicular to the motion.
The experimenters did not know exactly in which direction the Earth was moving but expected a difference.
One arm would point more in the direction of travel of the Earth than the other would. The result of the
experiment was that the velocity of light along each arm was equal. The arms were long and the detector
looked for interference between the two light beams. This made the measurement very sensitive. They
waited a few hours for the Earth to turn and the arms to point in different directions. The velocities were still
equal. They did it dozens of times with the same result. In the four-wheeler and ball example, this was like
the ball coming to the batter at the same speed whether the four-wheeler was coming or going away. This
was an astounding result. What is the explanation?
The great thinkers first pay attention to the details, but dont stay there. They next make their point of view
bigger. They think about everything connected to the details. Einstein didnt just think about the experiment.
He asked how we should change our thinking to make it agree with the experiment. It did not matter if the
change was silly or weird. This lead Einstein to ask himself the question what is reality? You cannot get
much bigger than that.
He worked through the thought experiments and decided that high-speed rockets moving by each other
could not change reality. The pilots should agree about most of their observations. Dont you think that
makes sense? He decided that there was no way for them to know their real speed. In fact, both could be
moving or either one could be stopped and only the other moving. Looking out a window does not help. You
would not know if what you see is moving or you are moving. Have you ever been in a vehicle stopped with
others? You look out the window and the vehicle next to you moves backward. For a second you cant
decide if it moved backwards or you went forwards. The pilots could only agree on the relative speed, the
difference in speed, between them.
Einstein decided that reality not changing meant that scientists on board would come up with the same laws
of physics. It does not matter which rocket you are on, or whether you are still or moving. If the rocket pilots
cannot tell if they are moving or not, then we on Earth also cannot tell and that is why the experiment failed
to measure the speed of the Earth. From thinking like this, Einstein came up with a powerful, simple theory
called special relativity. Special relativity is required when speeds are very fast, near the speed of light. He
accepted that the velocity of light is a universal constant. The velocity of light was the same no matter how
fast the source or observer was moving, even if they were moving nearly at the speed of light toward each
other. What Einstein did was simply restate the experimental results. Light travels at a constant speed no
matter how fast the source or receiver is moving. The constant velocity of light is one of the major results of
relativity.
Lightball Game
The announcer breaks into the program you are viewing and says, We switch now to live coverage of the
finish of the 22nd Century Lightball Championship. [Figure Lightball, drawing] It looks suspiciously like
the Blue Meanies game about 150 years ago. Their pitcher does not have a fastball and the count is two balls
and two strikes in the bottom of the ninth with bases loaded and the Blue Meanies ahead. Coach Nozarino
rolls in his secret weapon, the light speed rocket pack. Its not forbidden so its allowed, he says defiantly.
The pitcher puts on the rocket pack at second base and we have ignition. The pitcher flies over the mound at
98% of the speed of light. He fires his lightball laser gun. Will the batter be able to see it? He does. To the
batter it appears to travel at the speed of light like a standard Lightball and it is high and inside. Ball three.
The pitcher is desperate he turns up the power, and he and decides to trick the batter by firing his lightball
backwards while crossing the mound heading back to second. He tucks the lightball laser under his arm,
powers up his rocket, and fires while moving backward over the mound. Game over.
Coach Nozairino is all excited. Why did you fire backwards?
Pitcher replies, I know I cant throw faster than the speed of light. That is the speed limit for everything in
our universe, but I thought I could throw slower. You know a change-up.

11
Nozairino asks, Do you have a banana for a brain? The speed of light is a constant no matter if you go
toward or away from the batter so you cannot throw slower. I thought the rocket pack noise might confuse
their batter, and the batter would expect an extra fast pitch, but they all know relativity better than you do.
You, however, were brilliant to pitch backwards. Light from a source that is moving away shifts toward the
red. The rocket pack goes so fast that the lightball shifted past red into the infrared, a color the batter could
not see. Instead of a pulse of light, the lightball became a pulse of heat. He could not see it; he could not hit
it. He struck out.
The pitcher cheers, The Blue Meanies finally won!
Einsteins Solution
Experiments showed the speed of light is constant. To keep the speed of light constant and reality the same
for moving observers, space and time had to mix. The result of this mixing is that objects moving near the
speed of light squash in the direction of motion, get heavier, and their clocks run slower. If two rockets,
moving near the speed of light, pass each other, one observer would see the other rocket looking shorter and
with its clock running in slow motion compared to his own. Do you know which one? Trick question. Both
are doing exactly the same thing. The problem is unchanged by switching the two rockets. The problem is
symmetric to changing rockets. Whatever the pilot of one rocket sees, the other has to see the same. They
each would think the other passed them looking squashed and with their clock running slow. Symmetry is a
powerful tool. Since symmetry is common in nature, it is common in physics.
Mathematically these changes behaved as if time were another dimension, just like the three dimensions we
know. Everyone called it spacetime. The real difference between the two observers is that their spacetime
coordinates are rotated. Rotating coordinates in spacetime means any coordinate, x for example, would
become a combination of x, y, z, and time. The speed of light is the absolute speed limit for anything in our
universe. Muons are unstable elementary particles that decay in two millionths of a second, 2 x 10 -6 seconds.
If a muon could move at the speed of light, its time would have stopped (it would never decay). It would
have zero thickness in the direction of motion, and its mass would be infinite. That sounds very non-physical
and it is. The infinite mass means would require infinite force to get to light speed. Therefore, we never can
accelerate a particle with mass to the speed of light. Only massless particles, like light itself, can move at the
speed of light, but current accelerators can move muons fast enough to lengthen their lifetime to a
millisecond, one thousandth of a second, 10-3 seconds. That is 500 times longer than their lifetime if they are
not moving.
The time and length changes are precise and happen in a mathematical way called a rotation of coordinates.
This just means tilting the coordinates of a graph. What if Monaco, a European country smaller than some
parking lots, conquered the world? They wanted to be more popular and decided that the North Pole should
be in Monaco. That would be a rotation and movement of coordinates. All of the maps would have to be
redrawn. Every place on Earth would be south of Monaco. The old latitude and longitude lines would be
wrong. The new latitude and longitude would be a combination of the old ones. Not everything would
change. Would the distance from Rome to Paris have to be changed? Would the shape of Florida have
changed? If you walked up a creek to get to your friends house, would that change? If you said no to these
questions, you are right. Einstein knew that if the coordinate system moves to a train traveling in a straight
line at high velocity, the distances in four-dimensional spacetime do not change. Monacos rotating and
moving the coordinate system on the Earth leaves the Earth unchanged. Rotating the directions in spacetime
mixes space and time. From this, all of relativity follows.
We know Einstein was right when even though we do not have enough energy to move a rocket anywhere
near to the speed of light. Physicists have built accelerators that can move sub-atomic particles faster than
99.999% of the speed of light. Unstable particles moving that fast take much longer to decay. We do have
enough energy to move a clock fast enough to see relativity effects. Atomic clocks now orbit Earth. They are
very accurate and tick billions of times per second. They run exactly the way predicted by relativity. With
these hiflying clocks, there are two relativistic effects a slow down from their speed, and a quickening from
being in a since gravity is weaker up there. The latter comes from special relativity. Global positioning
satellite systems needs correction for relativity. Another property changes, the mass of the particles increase.
Einstein found the famous equation E = mc2 .This says that matter, m, can convert into energy, E, and vice
versa. The speed of light is c.
Messiness

12
Even though relativity mixes time with spatial coordinates, time remains special. One question that has
bothered scientists and philosophers for a long time is What is time? Can time go backward? We think
time moves in only one direction. We remember the past, but not the future. However, physics equations
work fine if you put in a negative time. That is exactly how to calculate where a planet was three years ago.
Relativity also allows negative time. Nevertheless, the universe seems to know which way time is going. It
goes from neat to messy just like your room. The universe began neatly. Everything was in a point at the Big
Bang. After, things got messy.
It is a law of classical physics that randomness, messiness, or information increases in all processes in the
universe. Physicists call it entropy. Information seems very different from messiness, but it is not. Think
about writing a long list of all the stuff in your room. You list what it is and where it is. It is a shorter list if
your room is neat. It takes more words to describe a mess.
Try this out if your Mom says you have to vacuum. I cant vacuum because it makes things messier. When
you vacuum, you are making the universe messier. The vacuum runs on electricity. The power plant that
makes the electricity burns coal with all the mess that comes from mining, shipping, burning, CO2, and
ashes. You have to eat food for the energy to push the vacuum around. You make waste. The walking and
vacuuming shreds up the rugs a little more, making more dust to clean up. When she knows all that, your
mother will forbid you to vacuum ever again.
If we are looking at a video of a system, we can determine if the movie is running forwards or backward by
seeing if the mess increases. Broken cups do not fly back onto a table and reassemble themselves. Positive
time goes in the direction of increased messiness. These concepts of entropy are very important in analysis
of the Big Bang.
Maxwells Equations
Maxwells equations were the greatest achievement of classical physics so we have to look at them. The four
equations for the magnetic field, M, and electric field, E, in free space are:

You may have seen magnetic field lines by holding a paper with iron filings over a magnet.
The equations are just for looking at. They are college level. How do they look to you? They are a
powerful set of equations and not bad looking as equations go. Physicists call them elegant, even beautiful.
The E and M, electric and magnetic fields, behave in the same way. Put more elegantly, the equations are
symmetric in E and M. If you switch M and E, you get back the same equations.
The triangle symbol with the dot and the triangle with an x after it are shorthand for two different ways of
calculating how a field changes in space. These two Maxwells equations say that the way one
electromagnetic field changes in space equals the way the other field changes with time. The two equations
that equal zero say the field is zero unless a charge or magnet is present.
If an electric field varies in time, it causes a perpendicular magnetic field varying in space, and vice versa. A
magnetic field varying in space causes an electric field varying with time. This action of causing each other
causes electromagnetic waves. A changing magnetic field produces a changing electric field, which produces
a changing magnetic field, which produces a changing electric field, and so on through space. This makes
waves like light, x-rays, and radio.
These equations are the basis for woofers, alternators, and computers. Physicists consider these equations
beautiful because the pack so much information into a compact form and they explain so much of the world.
Can spacetime simplify them even more? Einstein redid the equations in four-dimensional spacetime. A
change in spacetime covers changes in space and in time. The magnetic and electric fields combine into one
four-dimensional thing, F, filled with the parts of E and M in the different directions of spacetime. This had
an amazing result the four equations become one beautifully simple equation.
Maxwells Equation in Spacetime for F the Electromagnetic Field
F=0

13
F is the four-dimensional electromagnetic field. The is a four-dimensional grid made up of 1s, 0s, and
-1s. Four complex Maxwells equations became this one simple one when expressed in spacetime. Most
physics students spend a semester battling with the original Maxwells equations. Then this equation
appears, and they know once more, why they want to be physicists. The beauty of a theory often shows in
the math.
Einstein all dressed up in his Nehru jacket and cotton ball An equation is something for
hair. eternity.
A. Einstein
Einsteins theory of special relativity mixed together things that classical physics thought completely
separate space with time and energy with mass.
Gravity by Einstein
Einstein was not done. Special relativity uses Newtons gravitation and it explained the Earth speed
experiment. Special relativity says that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Newtons
gravitational field, however, works instantly between two objects no matter how far apart. Even Newton
noticed this and was uncomfortable. Einstein knew there was a mistake. Every mistake is an opportunity to
learn. For special relativity, he thought about viewers moving past each other at constant speed. What would
happen if their speed changed steadily? This is acceleration, and it leads to general relativity.
Gravity causes a constant acceleration. He considered gravity, the constant speed of light, and relativity, and
he wondered what different observers see when accelerating. You wake up one day and found yourself in an
elevator, and your weight is the same as before you went to bed. Are you still on Earth or are you in a rocket
accelerating at one g, the acceleration of gravity? Elevators have no windows so you couldnt tell. Einstein
concluded that an observer could not tell the difference between moving with a constant acceleration and
being still in a gravitational field. Then he predicted that the light from a star, passing close to the sun,
should bend toward the sun. How can that happen, since light has no mass? He discovered that anything
with mass distorts spacetime. If the space around the sun is distorted, then paths that would be straight are
bent, even the path of light that has no mass.
Fortunately, mathematicians, just fiddling around with an interesting problem, had discovered the math for
curved space. It is hard to picture a three-dimensional curved space. The sun makes a big dent in spacetime,
like a bowling ball on a soft bed. On Earth, we feel the suns dent weakly so far from the sun. It is still
strong enough to keep the Earth in orbit.
During an eclipse of the sun, you can see stars that graze the surface. The eclipse blocks the suns glare and
allows measurement of the position of those stars. [Figure space warp and sun blocked, illustrate] Their light
bends exactly as predicted, making it appear that those stars have moved. This gives an alternative view of
the gravitational force between masses. Mass distorts spacetime to make it look like there is a force.
Space and time, matter and energy are no longer the absolute unchangeable things they were in classical
physics. In special relativity, space and time mix when speeds approach the speed of light. In general
relativity, matter warps space. This is not just a local effect around stars like the sun. All of the matter in the
universe shapes the universe itself. All of this started with a puzzling result in measuring the speed of the
Earth.
Quantum Mechanics
Calculations of the color of hot objects kept making everything look much hotteryellower and whiter than
they were. This was frustrating. Everyone knows a heating element on a stove glows red. All efforts to
calculate this color came out white-hot. After much study, the only way to get the right colors for hot objects
was if hot atoms could not radiate any amount of light energy, but only amounts that were an integer times a
certain small chunk of energy. That meant energy and light came in chunks. An atom could emit one chunk
of energy or five, but it could not emit 4.7 units of energy.
Quantum means chunk. Quanta is plural, many chunks. Chunky bars come in quanta. The mechanics part in
quantum mechanics means how quanta move and interact. Solving this physics problem changed our ideas
about the very smallest objects and set limits on what we can know.
Quantum Land Playground
Imagine you and your strange alien friend, Qued, are in the quantum land playground. In quantum land, the
chunkiness is exaggerated. You ask Qued for a push on the swing. He pushes hard but nothing happens.
Qued gives a bigger push and you are swinging. At the high point, you are three feet off the ground.
14
 The strange creature Qued from the 26th dimension.

Push me higher. With the next push, you are six feet off the ground. Thats great. You are amazed
because even when you stop pumping and coast, you do not slow down a bit.
Hey Qued. You want to tell him about this but he thinks you want another push. Zap, instantly you are at
nine feet. This is above the bars and you feel those bumps. You try dragging your feet to slow down but your
feet slide over the ground without friction. [Figure Qued and kid quantum swing, drawing]
Qued, slow me down!
He tries to grab the seat but that has no effect. Hold on, says Qued. This is going to be rough.
Qued stands right in front of the swing and it knocks him down. Your height drops to six feet. He does it
twice more. You drop three feet each time so finally you stop.
Qued brushes himself off and says, Im glad the energy quanta arent any bigger.
What was happening, Qued?
The swing is quantized. You cannot just swing at any height you want. When I first pushed, I did not push
hard enough, I did not give you a whole quantum of energy. The quantum is enough energy to get you
swinging three feet high, or six feet if you have two, or nine feet when you absorb three energy quanta. The
heights in feet are the energy levels of the swing system.
You ask, But why couldnt I slow myself down?
Dragging your feet didnt work because you cant burn up a whole quantum of energy that way. Energy can
only be absorbed or released as a full quantum. The only way to drop you down to a lower energy level was
to absorb one quantum. To do that, I had to let the swing knock me down. Each time I went flying, I
absorbed one quantum. It is just the same with atoms in your world. Electrons spin around the nucleus at
various energy levels until they absorb a photon (light particle) with the right amount of energy to hop to a
higher level. Now Im going to go meet James to shoot some quantum pool.
Atomic Physics
Quantum mechanics stimulated intensive research into atoms. After discovery of the electron, atoms became
miniature solar systems with electrons orbiting the nucleus. The electrons gave problems. Physicists pictured
the negative electrons circling around a heavy positively charged nucleus. Opposite charges attract. Why did
the electrons not smash into the nucleus? It gets worse. Maxwells equations imply that an orbiting charge
makes electromagnetic waves. Making waves would make the electron lose energy and again spiral into the
nucleus. Did the solution to these problems have anything to do with energy coming in well-defined chunks?
Of course, energy chunks solved the problem. Just the discovery that energy came in chunks was enough
to change completely our view of the world.
Electrons circle the nucleus, but they cannot orbit just anywhere. Let us think about a city, Circleville, with
circular streets, in rings around a central park. [Figure Circleville, illustration] Moscow and Paris are partly
this way. When you park in Circleville, you can only park on a circular street. Parking on the grass is
forbidden. Streets are at set distances from the central park. The closest you can get to the center of town is
the street that circles the central park. The same is true of electrons around the nucleus. They can only be in
particular orbits. Energy levels can be changed up or down only by an exact amount of energy. This explains
why electron orbits are stable. When the electron is in its lowest energy level, there is nowhere lower to go.
Thus, there is no way to crash into the nucleus. This would be like driving on the grass of the central park.
Thats not allowed in Circleville. To make Circleville more like electrons around an atom, there are not any
streets going between circles. Then the cars behave like electrons; they cannot drive to another circle. They
have to circle around on the same street until they absorb or emit a lot of energy. Then pop! They appear on
another street. Circleville is a far-fetched analogy. Cars could never disappear and reappear. Many physicists
thought the same thing about electrons disappearing and reappearing at another level. It is pretty strange.
We Are Certainly Uncertain
The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics says that things on the atomic scale are not only chunky.
They are fuzzy. A fundamental fact of quantum mechanics is that we can never know exactly the position
and velocity of a particle. Quantum mechanics equations for the motion of elementary particles are

15
equations for a wave. The wave only predicts the chance (probability) of finding a particle here or there. It is
most likely located where the wave is the highest.
An oval balloon represents features of a wave function. The mid-section of the balloon represents the
position wave function and the ends the velocity wave function. If you squeeze it in the middle, it pops out
at the ends. If you accurately locate an electron, its velocity becomes more uncertain. The mechanical
universe cannot happen because nature prevents us from accurately knowing both the position and velocity
of an elementary particle. Chance did not feel right to many scientists, including Einstein. Some thought
there must be a better theory that would remove the uncertainty.
I am convinced that God does not play dice with the universe. A. Einstein
No one has come up with such a theory. Chunks and fuzz are how things are on the atomic scale. [Figure
chunky fuzzy particles, drawing] The nice universe ticking along like a clock does not apply. The universe
limits our knowledge. We are not complex wind-up robots.
James thinks he understands uncertainty. Qued, there are things in the ordinary world that are uncertain.
Thats true. We do not know what the weather will be a week from now or who will be elected president.
These are two kinds of uncertainty. We could know who will be elected if we asked everyone, but the
weather is chaotic. It depends on many more variables in such a way that a minor change in any variable can
make a big change in the weather. A butterfly flapping it wings in Madagascar could be the cause of a
hurricane in Florida. Really. Another unpredictable event is the decay of a radioactive atom. We know half
of a batch of these atoms will decay in a period of time called the half-life, but we dont know which atoms
or exactly when they will decay.
When I flip this penny in the air, you dont know if it will land heads or tails. Thats uncertainty, too.
James, Ill bet a penny against yours that I do.
Okay youre on.
Hold on while I set up my multi-laser ranging imager. It connects to this bio-implant computer.
Thats not a computer. Its a freckle on your arm.
That spot is a data interface to my bio-computer, James. This other freckle is my mainframe quantum
computer. Besides, I do not have arms. I am ready.
James starts flipping. He gets more and more excited and says, You were able to predict ten for ten. How
did you do that, Qued?
My equipment measured the spin, position, and velocity at the start of your coin toss. It is an easy
calculation to determine its orientation as it falls. Therefore considering also roughness and elasticity of the
floor, I can compute which side will be up.
James asks, If flipping a coin isnt really random, why cant we do the same thing with quantum processes
get better equipment to measure what we need to predict radioactive decay of an atom?
The hidden variables I measured allowed prediction of the coin flip. Quantum processes have no hidden
variables. That is why decay of an atom is unknown. In one half-life, an atom has a fifty percent chance of
decaying. That is all we can know. There is no way around the uncertainty in quantum mechanics. In fact,
there are at least three kinds of uncertainty. There is uncertainty due to chaos, the weather; uncertainty due to
lack of enough information, coin flip; and quantum uncertainty built into the universe.
Quantum Pool
James walks in and sees Qued setting up the pool table.
Come James, and lets shoot a little pool. This is quantum pool where the balls behave like sub-atomic
particles do in the real world.
Where are the balls, Qued?
They are the different colored clouds on the table. The cue ball is the white cloud. The balls are a little
fuzzy because on the quantum level, nothing ever stops, and our knowledge of things like position or energy
is only approximate. If you shoot other balls at the balls on the table then you can tell from the collisions
where the balls were. You still would not know where the balls are now because you would have knocked
the ball out of position and given it some velocity. No matter what technique you use, knowledge is limited
by the uncertainty.
Well I just tried a shot and missed the cue ball. [Figure quantum pool, drawing]
Yes, even the position and velocity of the cue ball are uncertain, but in quantum pool, you get to try until
you connect. I usually shoot with the metal end of this.
16
Qued, I did it. I hit the cue ball with your garden hoe.
As the cue ball moves away, its cloud gets wider. Yes, it is spreading out, just as the wave equation says.
Because it spreads out, we are less sure of the balls position. The brightness of the cloud shows where the
ball is most likely located. That was a good shot. The cloud is brightest right in line with the number five
ball.
Look at that. The white cloud passed right through the five-ball cloud. Thats not fair.
The cue ball as a particle can be anywhere in the cloud. Most likely it is at the center, but that time it was
not.
James gets some apple juice. Now the cue ball cloud has spread out over most of the table. Then he hears
a ball fall off the table and asks, What was that?
That was your cue ball. It tunneled through the pool table cushion. Remember, here we deal in
probabilities. Even though it is a sturdy cushion, there is some probability that the ball can leak through the
cushion. It did not make a hole through it. It did not jump over it. It just leaked through and suddenly it
appeared on the other side. If this did not happen, most computers would stop working. Quantum effects are
important in designing computers.
This quantum pool is sure hard.
That is true, James.
Look. Two new clouds are on the table. Are they balls? Where did they come from?
They are virtual balls. They pop up at random from the vacuum. The white cloud is a virtual cue ball. The
black one is a virtual anti-cue ball. Watch, they will roll only a few inches and then annihilate each other.
See; they are gone. Virtual elementary particles are continuously appearing and disappearing everywhere in
the universe, even in outer space. They affect how particles interact with each other.
String Break! With your thumb and finger, hold both ends of a whole, raw piece of spaghetti. This is a
stiff string like the ones in string theory. Holding the ends, slowly bend the spaghetti until it breaks. It
almost always breaks into three piecesnot two. Try it again. Why does it do that?
How Can We Understand Something We Cannot See?
At first physicists believed that three elementary particles: the proton, neutron, and electron were the only
ingredients for making everything. How could they study the elementary particles that are smaller than
atoms? The only way is to bounce the particles off each other.
Imagine it is your birthday. Your grandparents shipped a gift to you with strange directions for opening. Old
people get a little strange. First, it is put in a pitch-black room. They included an air cannon that can fire
different sized balls at the gift and they challenge you to shoot and then guess what it is. You decide to shoot
the beach balls. You cannot see any balls hit, but you note where you aimed and at what angle the balls
bounce back. If they do not return, they did not hit the present. From the hits, you can tell that it is roughly
four feet wide and three feet high, but that is all. What is it? You switch to tennis balls. Now some of the
balls go through in places that bounced back the beach balls. This means there are holes there smaller than
beach balls. One is middle height in the center, and the gift is rounded on both ends. What is it? Let us
shoot marbles. When you do that, you find two-foot diameter rings at the front and back. The inside of the
rings sometimes let a marble go through. Looking closely at the data, the rings seem to have wires, like
spokes, going through them. What is it?
Scientists have to shoot small particles to determine the structure of elementary particles. For a particle to be
small, it has to have high energy. The smaller the features you want to see, the higher the energy needs to be.
We could not detect the bicycle spokes until we used marbles. You can think of them as high-energy beach
balls.
For all of the 20th century, physicists shot elementary particles at targets to understand the structure of
matter. The first experiment was with radium that emits alpha particles. When aimed at a piece of aluminum
foil, most went right through. One in 1000 bounced back toward the source as if they hit a brick wall. This
showed that aluminum atoms were mostly empty space with a heavy center, the nucleus, which took up one
thousandth of the area of the atom. The nucleus was heavy enough that an alpha particle hitting it was like
bouncing a ball off a wall.
Some German scientists discovered that uranium released energy when hit with neutrons. Maybe you are
wondering why someone would aim neutrons at uranium. A climber asked why he climbed Mt. Everest, said
because it is there. That is a good answer for Why shoot neutrons at uranium? A scientist rarely knows the
17
results of an experiment. Otherwise, why do it? World War II started and there was a lot of fear that the
Germans could somehow turn uranium into a weapon, so we did. There was a huge concentration of
physicists at Los Alamos. They made the atomic bomb. Along the way, they developed nuclear physics and
quantum mechanics, and showed the way to nuclear power.

In the center is an eight story tall detector array and shielding at the Large Hadron Collider.

We learned the most from small balls shot at the bicycle. Physicists have to use small particles. Particles
behave like particles and like waves. Accelerating them to higher energy shortens their wavelength, making
observation of more detail possible. At high energy, the collision can also cause a reaction producing new
types of particles. When the particles are photons, their wavelength also decreases with energy. Thus,
gamma rays show more details than red light.
Accelerators
Accelerators and colliders are the machines that produce high-energy particles. The first ones were metal
donuts filled with vacuum. Magnets bent the path of the charged particles into a circle to stay in the donut.
To get them to move faster, a microwave signal made a wave that the particles surf on to higher energy. Then
the particles hit a target where nuclear reactions take place, sometimes making brand new particles. The first
accelerators could fit on a desk. To get higher energy, accelerators had to be bigger. After World War II,
building and using accelerators became a major effort in nuclear physics. This work is high-energy physics.
An accelerator beam hits a stationary target. For even more energy, two high-energy beams accelerate and
hit each other.

18
 Aerial view of the countryside over the five-mile
diameter LHC. At the top of the photo are the Swiss
Alps.

The biggest collider is the Large Hadron Collider, LHC, in Switzerland. The vacuum pipe that the beam
follows is a circle five miles in diameter. The LHC gives protons a lot of speed or energy by creating strong
electromagnetic waves that push them along. The protons divide into two groups that move in opposite
directions through a ring shaped vacuum pipe. As they go faster, their mass increases. That is relativity. The
particles then slam into each other. During the collision, the particles energy and mass can convert into new
heavier particles. This process creates heavy unstable particles for study. Giant arrays of detectors six stories
tall monitor the reactions. Many different detection techniques are available. Modern ones are ionization
chambers and bubble chambers. The ionization chambers work very much like Geiger counters did, but at
LHC, they are gigantic. The LHC energy may be high enough to make a black hole.
A problem with quantum mechanics was that it was not compatible with relativity. General relativity showed
that gravity was due to a warping of space by anything that has mass. Quantum mechanics had discovered
the constantly bubbling energy and virtual particles in the vacuum. The virtual particles shred up spacetime
so badly that the equations of relativity give crazy results. They just do not apply.
In many other ways, quantum mechanics is impressive. Physicists can very accurately calculate the
properties of atoms, molecules, and interactions of elementary particles. Particles had properties of both
waves and particles. Virtual particles made their influence felt by how they changed reactions between
particles. The properties of the elementary particles always were uncertain.
Accelerators produced two hundred different elementary particles. Having hundreds of elementary particles
did not seem right. That many particles did not seem elementary any more. In addition, attempts to calculate
the interactions between particles often gave infinite answers. Something big was wrong. The Standard
Model solved both these problems. The excess particles were not elementary, but composed of other
particles. A trick solved the infinity problem.
The Standard Model contains a method or recipe for calculating the interaction of particles with each other
and with the forces of nature. The Standard Model rests upon special relativity, quantum mechanics, and the
rule that particles are points, with radius of zero. Special relativity does not include gravity. The equations of
the Standard Model do not work if any of these three things are wrong. Early accelerators showed that
particles are not points. Ignore that. Still keep radius zero in the calculations.
Even though the calculations take the wrong radius, the calculations are very accurate, usually closer than
one part per million. If you counted the number of grains of sand in a thimble, it would come out about a
million. For your result to be as good as the Standard Model, your count could only be off by one grain of
sand. To get that kind of accuracy the Standard Model needs to have nineteen physics constants inputted.
These are things like the mass of the elementary particles, the strengths of the forces, and the magnitude of
particle charges.

19
The Standard Model requires several tricks. One trick fixes the problem caused by requiring that the radius
of the particles be zero. We saw with Newtons Law of Gravitation that this results in infinity. The other trick
comes from quantum mechanics itself. Particles are fuzzy and in turn, how they interact is fuzzy. Any
interaction has a whole series of ways it might occur and a range of possible outcomes. Many of these
variations are due to virtual particles popping up in the middle of the reaction. The Standard Model
calculates the main possibilities and the probabilities that they will happen. The sum of the possibilities
times their probability gives the Standard Model answer. Quantum pool showed some of the possibilities.
Pool balls would end up in different pockets according to a probability curve, the wave function. Balls aimed
at each other could hit or pass through each other without interacting. In addition, virtual particles can pop
up. The virtual particles can appear in varying numbers, kinds, and places in an interaction. With balls shot
at a bicycle, this would be as if a tennis ball changed into a virtual pair of beach balls, and back to a tennis
ball while hitting the bike. In another possibility, the beach ball could become a virtual pair of marbles that
annihilate and produce a tennis ball. There are dozens of other variations. This sounds crazy talking about
balls and marbles, but in the quantum world, this behavior is normal. Therefore, there are many ways for a
reaction to happen. Quantum mechanics has to calculate the likelihood of many possibilities and sum them
up for the right answer.
To keep track, physicists use Feynman diagrams. Each diagram represents a possible interaction and defines
the required calculation. Fortunately, the first few simplest possibilities contribute most of the answer.
Physicists ignore the rest because they occur too rarely. The diagrams account for the quantum uncertainty in
the wave function of the particle. There are always many possibilities. [Figurebike Feynman diagram,
drawing] This calculation is partly a trick because it does not give the right answer; it gives an approximate
answer. The answer gets more accurate by considering more possibilities.
How can the Standard Model be accurate when many calculations give infinity? Along the way, infinities are
removed by a clever math trick we will call the infinity stomper. This is like Infinity Wars. If one step of
your calculation gives infinity, find a negative infinity to cancel it. When the infinities cancel each other, the
leftovers are very accurate. Nobody likes this trick. It is as if we took infinity minus infinity equals almost
zero. That is not valid math, but it works. Infinity stomping fails completely for anything involving gravity.
For example, when the Standard Model calculates the mass of a particle, it could turn out to be heavier than
a Buick

Elementary particles create tiny bubbles as they move through ultra-cold liquid hydrogen. Magnets bend
paths of the charged particles.

Elementary Particles
The Standard Model of quantum mechanics made sense of the many elementary particles. Most of them
were not elementary. The result is only twelve truly elementary particles and five other particles that carry
20
the four forces. The weak force, involved in radioactive decay, is unusual requiring both W and Z force
particles. Half of the twelve particles are lightweight, for example the neutrino, electron, and muon. These
lightweights are the leptons. Half the particles are quarks, -which provide most of the mass of the universe.
All of matter is composed of these two groups. If you know a little about atoms, you may be wondering
where the proton and neutron are. They are no longer elementary particles, because they contain three
quarks. A neutron contains an up and two down quarks. The proton is two ups and a down. Gluons that carry
the strong force hold the quarks together. Yes, the name gluons came from glue. The weak and strong forces
are short range and act only between quarks in the nucleus. Passing gluons back and forth keeps the nucleus
together. The electromagnetic and gravitational forces are long range.
There are three families of particles. They each have a particle similar to an electron, another particle similar
to a neutrino and two quarks. Neutrinos have no charge and nearly zero mass. From family I to III, the mass
of the particles increases. In everyday experience, we only observe the first family, and these four particles
and the four forces make up our world. Quantum mechanics does not have a good explanation for the
families. One family seems to be enough. The other two families only occur in high-energy collisions.
FORCE MASS
photon electron mu tau Leptons
gluon neutrino mu neutrino tau neutrino Leptons
W, Z up charm top Quarks
graviton down strange bottom Quarks
I II III FAMILY
Each particle has an anti-particle. Anti-particles make up anti-matter. If a particle meets its anti- particle,
they both annihilate with a burst of pure energy. All of their mass converts to energy. The equations in
physics are the same for matter and antimatter. That makes most physicists believe there should be as much
antimatter as matter in the universe. As astronomers look over the universe, they cannot find any antimatter.
Anti-matter galaxies should be crashing into matter galaxies and be the brightest things in the sky. Why is
this not happening if the laws of physics are the same for matter and antimatter? Neither quantum mechanics
nor string theory has a widely accepted answer.
Forces exist only between particles with mass. Forces are due to the exchange of virtual force particles. This
is hard to understand and harder to prove. There is no way to detect a virtual particle. This is another
example where we have to believe the math. When calculating the effect of forces on elementary particles,
the results are super accurate only if virtual force particles are included. Remember that a virtual particle is
real for that short instant of time that it exists.
Qued, I believe in force fields a little because Ive played with magnets, but I dont see how exchanging
virtual particles can make a real force. Can you explain? asked Goofer.
Sure, Goofer, you get in between Courtney and James. They are going to experience the Goofer force.
James, push Goofer at Courtney. Goofer bounces into Courtney and pushes her backward. Courtney, you
just felt a force from the exchange of a Goofer particle.
Yes I did and it was repulsive.
Correct. Goofer brought some momentum to you and it pushed you away just like identically charged
particles repel each other by exchange of a virtual photon.
Goofer wants to know, How can I become an attractive force?
James mumbles, I dont think he can.
We have to remember that we are dealing with individual elementary particles and the uncertainty principle
applies. That means that the position and velocity of all three of you are fuzzy. To be proper fuzzy particles
you have to be vibrating like crazy. The three kids become three blurry clouds, making shrieking sounds.
Ill stop you two so you can see what Goofer does. Goofers position and velocity are fuzzy. In fact, even
his existence is fuzzy. Qued continues, Watch what happens when I make Goofer into an attractive force.
Courtney and James were in a Goofer cloud. There were multiple images of Goofer going in all different
directions.
James smiled and said, The Goofer cloud is now big enough to surround Courtney and me. Im feeling
Goofer bumping me on all sides but mostly from behind.
Im feeling the same thing. Those bumps are pushing us together, said Courtney.
When Goofer solidified again he said, I knew I was attractive to Courtney.
21
Applying the uncertainty principle to you, Goofer, shows how an exchange of force particles can create an
attractive force but its even more complicated. An exchange sometimes uses two or more Goofers.
Courtney and James also have uncertain position and momentum. They would start as separate blurs, and
their probability waves would have different shapes since they are male and female. Physicists account for
all this in the probability waves for the particles. When done correctly, the probability waves for the original
particles are still a pair of bumps but they bend a little toward each other and the centers of the bumps get
closer as time goes by. The result of such a calculation for real particles and forces is as accurate as we can
measure.
All this high-energy physics is so strange that maybe it is sounding to you like a sci-fi movie. Here is the
opening scene. You are in a giant laboratory.
The mad scientist (Why are they always mad?) is explaining to his teen-age sidekick, There are these
virtual, not real particles, and they can never be detected, and they are used in a bookshelf full of difficult
theory turned into terabytes of calculations by supercomputers to explain what happens when points of
matter that cant be seen, come together in a billion dollar accelerator, an international group of scientists
buried in Switzerland, where thousands of supercomputers decide yes, that is the event we were looking for,
and when the particular event appears well know that the Klingons are preparing to invade or that string
theory is correct.
Even though it sounds like science fiction, it is all true, except for the Klingons.
Quantum mechanics does not have gravity. Strings naturally produce a force particle predicted for gravity,
the graviton. No one has seen it. The exchange of virtual gravitons between particles causes gravity. Another
possibility to give particles mass is the Higgs particle. Space would be full of Higgs particles. Other particles
have to push through this Higgs sea and that makes mass. Discovery of the Higgs would complete the
standard quantum mechanical model of elementary particles. There have been many efforts to detect the
Higgs. They failed. Physicists hope the LHC will have enough energy to produce it. Strings naturally give
mass to the elementary particles. The energy of the string vibration comes from and equals the mass, E =
mc2. Longer strings and strings with more wiggles have greater vibration energy and greater mass.
Gravity does not fit in quantum mechanics. Physicists do not like this but can live with it. That is where
things stood until black holes. The center of a black hole is extremely small, smaller than an elementary
particle and therefore requires quantum mechanics but it contains the mass of many stars, requiring general
relativity. They have a lot of gravity but it comes from a point. Quantum mechanics with gravity or string
theory is required to understand black holes.

Entanglement
One of the stranger quantum phenomena is entanglement. Even physicists think this is spooky. Qued is
going to demonstrate it to Goofer.
Goofer, today we are going to learn about spin and entanglement. Elementary particles have a quantum
property called spin. In some ways, it is like the spinning of a top but it has weird quantum properties and
once spinning, the particle never runs down or stops. An electrons spin is quantized and can have only one
of two states, spin + (spin up) or spin (spin down). Like other properties of an electron, the spin is
uncertain until we measure it. On average, half of a group of electrons will have spin +, and the other half
will have spin .
Okay, electrons spin only two ways, spin up, and spin down. I have a toy gyroscope that can spin on either
end, Says Goofer as he tiptoes around.
You notice all the small boxes I have assembled?
Yeah, Im falling all over them. Whats inside? says Goofer.
Each contains a penny. These pennies have the quantum property of entanglement. This is a property that
real elementary particles have. You can shake up the boxes then look to make sure they are randomly heads
or tails.
Goofer shakes and opens one hundred boxes. They look random, 52 heads and 48 tails. I got my hair
tangled in box 34.

22
This entanglement happens when the pennies interact. We do that by touching two boxes together. When
the pennies are entangled, they behave like electrons and must be in opposite states, one heads and one
tails, says Qued.
How do we know which will be which?
That we cant know, says Qued. The state of a penny is a quantum variable that is simply unknown until
we make a measurement. We know that whenever we look at an individual penny, it has equal probability of
being heads or tails. If an interaction entangles electrons, then we know that they will be in opposite states.
Now touch together the sides of any two boxes. This entangles the pennies. Then open the boxes, and they
will be opposite, one heads and one tails.
Goofer gets busy. Youre right. Every pair of boxes I have touched together and opened has one penny
heads and one tails. No pairs are either both heads or both tails. How did you do that Qued? Do you have a
hidden flipper in the second box so you can set the penny correctly? Maybe thin fiber optic cables connect
them and allow each to sense the other. The pennies or boxes must be signaling each other.
No, Goofer, there is no communication between the pennies. By the standard interpretation of quantum
mechanics each penny before or after entanglement is fifty percent heads and fifty percent tails. You ensured
this by shaking up the boxes when we started.
Does that mean they are on edge?
They are not on edge. The pennys heads state is like an electron with spin + or spin up. The tails state
corresponds to an electron with spin down or spin . A penny on its edge would be like saying an electron
is at spin zero. Thats forbidden for electrons and being on edge is forbidden for these pennies.
Goofer, looking even more puzzled than usual, asks, Then shouldnt I see a blur of heads and tails when I
open a box.
Not in a quantum universe. The act of observing forces the penny into one of the allowed states. Some
physicists think it is meaningless even to ask what the penny is doing when we do not look at it. The penny
exists in a well defined state when we do look at it.
What if we had a flash camera in the box and we trip it just before opening?
That would be equivalent to a measurement and would force the entangled particle into the opposite state.
Quantum effects are normal for elementary particles. Everything is made of elementary particles and has
quantum behavior. It is hard to see quantum effects for large objects.
I dont want to think about this. My brain is melting down like ice cream in frying pan, but I could work a
good scam on Courtney. We entangle a pair of pennies. I give her one box and bet her I can guess if her
penny is heads or tails. I look at mine and guess the opposite.
Qued says, That would work and you would guess it right every time, but I can tell you a more dramatic
demonstration. She might wonder if the pennies or boxes could be communicating with each other. The
fastest any signal can move is the speed of light. If the pennies are far apart before opening, then we can
open them quickly before any information would have time to travel between the pennies. You and Courtney
synchronize watches. After entangling a pair of boxes, you take one by rocket to Mars. You and Courtney
open your boxes at the same time. The pennies will still be opposite. This is true even though it takes
minutes for any signal to get from here to the Mars. In this example, there is no chance for one penny or box
to signal the other. If one penny is heads, the other knows instantly to be tails.
I bet no one ever proves anything as crazy as entanglement.
Entanglement experiments usually use photons and measure the polarization of light. This experiment has
been done and entanglement was confirmed, and the photons were in the correct states instantaneously.
Goofer says, Thats cool, Qued. Can you do anything with a pea under one of three shells? Meanwhile Ill
go get Courtney.
Symmetry
Almost every paper in high-energy physics mentions symmetry. Something is symmetrical or has symmetry
if it is similar to its original state after you apply a change. Daisies are symmetrical to a rotation. If you turn
one the width of a petal, it looks the same. The human face is symmetrical to a reflection through a vertical
plane at the middle of the face. An isosceles triangle (three equal sides) is symmetrical to a rotation of 120
degrees. Symmetry is not limited to physical things. We saw symmetry in Maxwells equations. There are
symmetries in art and music.

23
There are many symmetries we take for granted. There is the linear symmetry of time. You are pretty much
the same as you were a half hour ago. All the laws of physics are the same as they were a half-hour ago, and
at any other time. Symmetry is very important to physics. A law of physics comes from every symmetry. The
law connected to time symmetry is the conservation of energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. There
is symmetry to spatial position. Moving an experiment twenty feet over does not change results. Symmetry
to spatial position gives the law of conservation of momentum.
Whats Real?
There is the old brainteaser, If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound? Are things still there
when we are not looking? We would say yes to both these questions but quantum mechanics leads in a
different direction.
Quantum mechanics is weird in many ways but one of the weirdest things is how observation influences
things on the quantum scale. We cannot see or touch an electron. When we look at TV, we are seeing light
that happened when an electron hits the screen. At quantum pool, we learned that electrons are usually a
wave. If they remained waves, the TV would be blurry. It is not, and if we used a microscope, we could look
at individual light pulses from individual electrons hitting the screen. Why do we get The Today Show
instead of a blur? That is the weird part. When we observe the electrons by tuning in, we collapse their wave
functions or probability waves. What does that mean? Before we look, the electron is smeared out
somewhere in the picture tube. It is most likely where its probability wave is highest. Once we look, it is
100% where we found it in The Today Show image on your TV. How did that happen? I know fifty
thousand physicists that would like someone to tell them how it happens. No one knows. It just happens.
The usual explanation is that the electron is everywhere until observed. Then pop. There it is somewhere at
random inside the wave function. Another is that the electron is nowhere until we do a measurement.
Another idea is that the electron follows all possible paths but in different universes. When we see it, we
settle both of us into the universe where we see The Today Show with the electron lighting up a spot in the
upper left corner.
This problem has led some physicists to consider if thoughts or consciousness has some connection to the
quantum world. Physicists have wondered about this for nearly 100 years. What do you think changes the
electrons from wave to particle?
Summary of 20th Century Physics
Much more science happened in the twentieth century than in the rest of human history. The acceleration of
research continues. The 20th century began with two minor problems. Their solution led to quantum
mechanics and relativity. Relativity mostly changed our idea of space and gravity. Special relativity showed
that time behaves similar to a space dimension. At speeds near the speed of light, objects shrink, clocks slow,
and mass increases. Mass can convert to energy and vice versa.
Force is something we all know because we can feel gravity. Physics digs deeper and asks what produces the
force. We looked at three versions of gravity. Newton believed it was a field. A mass just naturally makes the
field. He gave an equation to calculate the field anywhere. Einstein described gravity as a warp of spacetime.
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. A. Einstein
He gave equations to calculate the warp. These two theories almost agree. Einsteins theory is better because
it correctly predicted the bending of light by the sun. Quantum mechanics sees gravity as coming from
exchange of gravitons but when applied it gives elementary particles heavier than a Buick. Gravity shapes
the whole universe.
Quantum mechanics gives a series of results that are completely different from ordinary experience. Sub-
atomic particles behave like both waves and particles. These particle-waves can tunnel through barriers. Our
measurements on them always are uncertain. It is not a matter of buying new instruments or being more
careful, the uncertainty is part of the universe. There is a good reason quantum mechanics seems so strange.
It is concerned with objects far smaller than anything we can see or feel.
The number of elementary particles went from just the proton, neutron, and electron to about 200 more.
High-energy accelerators discovered these. They get protons or electrons moving near the speed of light and
slam them into a target. Putting that much energy into a tiny spot can create particles never before seen. In
the last half of the 20th century, the Standard Model reduced the number of elementary particles to a dozen.
Standard Model calculations often produced infinite results, but a trick called renormalization or infinity
stomping can cancel the infinity and still leave very accurate results. It does not work for gravity.

24
Newtons laws were wonderful. If you knew where everything is and the velocity of everything, then you
could accurately calculate the past and the future. Quantum measurements, however, are fuzzy. It is
impossible to measure anything without changing other things. Measurements come in pairs, like velocity
and position. The more accurately you measure one, the less accurate the other becomes. This is the
uncertainty principle. Therefore, the classical idea of finding the position and velocity of everything so you
can predict the future cannot happen.
Quantum mechanics does not make sense to us. We operate in the normal sized world. Quantum effects also
happen here but they are so small that we cannot detect them with the best instrumentation, and we certainly
cannot see them. We touch one result of quantum mechanics when we use a computer. In fast computer
chips, electrons often move by quantum tunneling. Nano-technology has to consider quantum effects. At the
atomic scale and smaller, chunkiness and fuzziness rule.
Quantum mechanics and relativity deal with opposite ends of the universe, sub-atomic particles, and the
whole universe. It is hard to imagine that a single theory could combine them. Worse than that, the equations
of quantum mechanics do not know there is such a thing as spacetime or gravity. Quantum mechanics and
relativity could not work together. Black holes require both and are a big problem to theoretical physics.
Gravity was not the only problem. Eight of the elementary particles look like excess baggage. The universe
might be fine without them. Physicists adjust nineteen physical constants to make the Standard Model work
and fit the observed properties of the elementary particles. It would be nice if the theory predicted the values
of the nineteen numbers. Even better would be to explain the origin of the elementary particles.
String theory is required to agree with both quantum mechanics and relativity results. Both are correct in
their where they apply and they are very accurate.
String Theory
Quantum mechanics required accepting some bizarre new ideas: particle-waves, quanta, observers affecting
reality, and uncertainty built into the world. String theory is going to make these seem ordinary. String
theory, as the first scientific theory of everything, should explain all the forces and elementary particles. It
should explain the origin and evolution of the universe. String theory should agree with the accurate results
of quantum mechanics and relativity and become the foundation of the rest of science. Physicists came to
string theory by observations of the biggest and smallest things in our universe. We do not have any
experience of these realms. It is no wonder string theory is going to seem strange.
Our thoughts about the basic components of the universe have changed greatly since we first started thinking
about it.
Oh! Himmel! My If at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. Imagination is more
mustache is slipping important than knowledge. A. Einstein
In the last century, physicists discovered the twelve elementary particles. Surprisingly, eight of those twelve
do not occur naturally and appear to be unnecessary. Coincidentally we are back to four modern elements
or elementary particles that make up everything. String theory reduces that to one thing: string.

Many Beginnings of String Theory

Physicists realized that many of the problems in high-energy physics came from regarding particles as
points. Many calculations of particle properties gave infinity. Within a few years of the first discoveries in
quantum mechanics, some of its founders tried to replace the point with a more realistic small sphere. Even
the best physicists could not make it work. Nevertheless, most physicists knew that particles were not points.
Later there was only a small effort to replace points, because the Standard Model could give the right
answers.
During the last century, physicists tried to unite the forces by making them different aspects of one force.
This was successful for the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces. Gravity was the odd man out. Thus the
centurys two greatest discoveries: the Standard Model of quantum mechanics and relativity had little to do
with each other. Efforts to add gravity to the Standard Model was like adding vinegar to milk. They led to
lumps of infinities that made the calculations wrong. Adding the Standard Model to relativity made relativity
go crazy because virtual particles rapidly pop up and disappear. This made spacetime twist, turn, and tear
and that makes the equations of relativity break down. Nevertheless, it simply was not acceptable that the
Standard Model and relativity did not fit together.

25
Many physicists would like to take credit for string theory. Like most things in science, string theory did not
pop into existence from one person. It evolved from earlier work as many unrelated paths crossed. Soon
after Einstein discovered relativity, two physicists tried to unite the only known forces, gravity and the
electromagnetic force. They did it! This was astonishing since these two forces seem so different. The trick
was adding another dimension to spacetime. In a universe with four space dimensions instead of our three,
there was just one force. Let us call it electrogravity. When they calculated what electrogravity looked like in
our familiar three space dimensions, this one force split and became two forces, gravity, and the
electromagnetic force. This astonishing idea gave an amazing result. At the time, no one took it seriously. An
extra dimension seemed too strange. The recently discovered nuclear forces did not fit the four-dimensional
picture. For 50 years, the idea was lost.
Another push toward string theory came from the study of scattering of elementary particles. In these
experiments, a beam of particles hits a target and the particles go flying in all directions. The equation that
best described the results looked familiar. Scientists went back two hundred years to identify the equation as
Eulers equation describing the motion of a vibrating body like a guitar string.
Around the same time, some physicists started working out the behavior of quantized strings. Why? Because
their TV was broken? Did they just think it was something interesting to do? Could they make it a
homework problem for graduate students? To them it was just an interesting thing to do like learning a new
hip-hop dance move. They did not expect their work to be very significant. Some of the results were very
strange.
They first worked out the behavior of real strings using classical physics. Then they turned on quantum
mechanics by making the energy of the string come in quantum chunks. The results were interesting but they
soon found that the strings could not move. That was not a good result if this were ever to become a theory
of elementary particles, but it gets weirder.
The calculation also produced a tachyon particle. Tachyons move backwards, yes, sdrawkcab in time.
Giving them energy slows them down. They have imaginary mass equal to a tenth of a Cheshire cat. They
only exist in science fiction. This was a big hint that string theory would never apply to anything in the real
world.
This was the situation at the start of string theory. Several things pointed vaguely to the idea of particles
being like vibrating strings. Curiously, only one of these came from an experiment. The other ideas were
theoretical. As a Moody Blues song puts it, Thinking is the best way to travel. Before this, experiments
usually turned up something that theory could not explain. That would get the theorists going and
experimenters would do more work in order to give theory people enough to build a new theory. After that,
more experiments would confirm the theory. With string theory, theory took the lead and experiment has not
been able to catch up.
String Theory with a Jump Rope
You can start to learn about string theory from life sized strings or rope. An interesting property of string is
that it can only wiggle in particular ways. Grab your jump rope and tie one end to a railing or something else
that does not move, like your Dad watching football. Your rope will copy the behavior of real strings. Hold
the rope and rotate your hand the way you usually do when you play jump rope. A single bump goes round
and round, and that pattern repeats as long as you keep your hand moving. Now try going slower and faster.
The rope will not turn well at just any frequency but only turns well at the first speed you used.
You have just discovered the lowest energy level or lowest energy mode of vibration of your rope. If you
start moving your hand much faster, you can get the rope moving nicely again but with two bumps. [Figure
jump rope speeds patterns, illustrate] You have to look sharp but one bump is up, the other down, and then
they switch. Notice it takes more energy to get your rope going with two bumps than one. The rope is also
moving at a higher frequency of rotation. This is the second energy level. If you can get more speed, you can
get three bumps. The energy of your jump rope is quantized. Only certain amounts of energy make it turn
smoothly.
This is how the strings of string theory behave. Strings vibrate only in certain modes. The vibration modes
have different amounts of energy. Using E = mc2, this gives a distinct mass for each mode. Elementary
particles come only in certain masses. Maybe we are on to something. That is a smart jump rope. The
different modes of vibration of strings correspond to the elementary particles in the universe. The first four
modes of vibration of strings should correspond to neutrino, electron, up quark, and down quark.

26
Forces
There is only one kind of string. All the variety of things in the world is due to where and how strings
vibrate. Each way a string vibrates is a different elementary particle. From quantum mechanics, we know
elementary particles are complex and can be waves. That is their behavior at atomic size, but if you could
look deep inside you would see a single tiny vibrating string. Instead of calling elementary particles
elementary string vibrations, we will usually call them particles or elementary particles as most physicists
do. Remember that from now on elementary particles means elementary strings.
One kind of string vibrating in different modes can generate the elementary particles. Other types of string
vibration create the particles that carry force. Quantum mechanics took the forces and particles as the fixed
properties of the world and built up the theory from there. The theory had nineteen parameters or constants
that determined particle masses and force strengths. String theory explains all the forces and particles with
one constant, the stiffness of the string.
In string theory, the four forces are united in a very profound way. The forces are the same thing, in a sense
because they are just different vibrations of string. The personality of each force comes from the shape of
spacetime and the mode of vibration of the string. Force particles and mass particles are fundamentally the
same. Again they too are just string vibrating in different ways. You, bacteria, atoms, stars, everything is
string vibrations. [Figure funny virtual particles with messages between strings, drawing]
The four forces differ in strength and the distance over which they act. They are so different that it is hard to
imagine they could arise from different modes of vibration of string. The forces we know perssonally are
electromagnetic and gravity. They both have a long range, which is why we know them; we can feel them.
The electromagnetic force is fascinating because it accounts for things as different as lightning, magnets,
light, radio, and x-rays. Strong and weak forces are nuclear forces that do not reach outside the nucleus. We
do not feel them.
Comparison of the Four Forces
FORCE STRENGTH RANGE CARRIER
Strong force Strong 10+3 nucleus gluon
+1
Electromagnetic Medium 10 infinite photon
-10
Weak force Weak 10 nucleus W+, W-, Z
Gravity very weak 10-35 infinite graviton
There is a huge difference in strength between gravity and electromagnetic force. The electromagnetic force
is 10+36, a million quadrillion quadrillion, times stronger than gravity. However, that does not seem right
gravity holds us on the Earth. One followed by 36 zeros is a big multiplier. Gravity holds us down on Earth.
Did you ever rub a balloon on someones hair? The static electricity makes their hair stands straight up.
Thats the electromagnetic force generated by a little static electricity from hair beating the force of gravity
produced by the
whole Earth, trying to pull it down. The electromagnetic force wins; your hair goes up, even though the
Earth is huge and heavy.
String theory inherits the quantum mechanics view that forces are due to the exchange of virtual force
particles. The four fundamental forces, electromagnetic, strong, gravity, and weak hold the world together by
exchange of virtual force carrying strings. These are, respectively, the photon, gluon, graviton, and the W
and Z bosons. These strings are vibrating at different notes or frequencies and can have different spin and
mass.
String Break! Silly String was discovered in 1972, the year that string theory began. That is suspicious.
There is a tenth of a mile of string in a can. The army uses silly string. No, not to make the enemy
laugh. In Afganistan, they spray it ahead before they enter buildings. Some buildings are booby-
trapped. Silly string hangs on the trip wires, showing where explosives are. Soldiers should be home
where their kids can cover them in silly string.
String Surprises
String theory may be able do it all and explain everything, but it very quickly gets more complicated. The
first complication is just the change from points in quantum mechanics to string. A point has no size. It has
no direction. From all directions, it looks the same, completely spatially symmetric. Strings break that
symmetry. A string has length. The length can point in a particular direction. The effect of a force still

27
depends on the direction the force is pointing, but now may also depend on the direction the string is
pointing.
When a point is still, it is still. Even if a string stops, it still vibrates near the speed of light. Therefore,
strings must always obey the rules of relativity. Strings, like points, also have to obey all normal laws of
physics, like conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum (spin). When a string moves in
spacetime, its spin, mass, charges, and length stay the same. As a string moves, we cannot have one end
show up in St. Louis and the other in New York.
A string can change shape. When bumping into other strings, strings can split or join the other strings. All
this is much more complicated than what points can do. These complications result in many rules that strings
must obey. Does your school have so many rules that no one ever gets a hall pass? String theory is just like
that. There are so many rules that a string cannot move at all. This is not going to be a good theory of
everything if nothing moves. You will never guess how physicists solved this problem.
We cant solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. A. Einstein
The Rope to School
No one is confused about the three dimensions of space. Thinking of your town, they are north south, east
west, and height. Three numbers can locate anything in your room, on Earth, or out in space. The three
dimensions are also the three different ways something can move. Hmmm, strings cannot move.
Imagine you tied a rope seven blocks long between your school and your house. Why? Well, tomorrow you
are going to get drops in your eyes and you are sure you would get lost without the rope. You want to meet
Courtney today at the rope. It is so long that you have to tell her more. You are very precise and tell her to
meet you at 152 meters from the school end. At 152 meters is just one dimension. An ideal string (the
abstract mathematical string in physics) has just one dimension. You go but she is not there. You call her
back and find out that she was there ten minutes before you. You have to add the time. You agree to meet at
the same point on the rope at 3:45 P.M. Time is one of the dimensions of spacetime. You need it to meet
Courtney.
You meet and talk. Both of you decide to go back to your laptops and play with your computer controlled
miniature mechanical bugs. Lets have the bugs meet at the same spot, 152 meters, at 5:10 PM Central
time. [James fig of rope, bugs, and neighborhood drawing] The bugs are one-tenth the size of a period but
have excellent claws. They give good wireless video feedback to your computer allowing you to direct your
bug to the right place and time but Courtneys bug is not there. After a flurry of emails, you figure out that
hers is on top of the rope and yours is on the bottom. You need another dimension to give the angle around
the rope, and you decide to meet at 90 degrees.
For people meeting at the rope two dimensions were fine, time and the length along the rope. For the small
bugs, we needed a third, the angle around the rope. The angle around the rope is an unnecessary small
dimension to you. If you back up far enough from the rope, that dimension is invisible. Were not done yet.
The bugs are so small that they can push into the rope. We have to add how deep in the rope, giving four
dimensions. Ropes are made of strings. If we had super-miniature bugs, we would need to say which string
and add the angle and depth in the string giving seven dimensions. In addition, strings are made of threads
three more dimensions giving ten. Threads in turn are made of fibers so we could go on. We dont have to
because ultra-microbugs dont come out until next year. The added dimensions in this example were small
enough for kids to ignore. Only the miniature bugs could sense them. This example shows how some
dimensions can be so small that they are invisible and ordinarily unnecessary to us. Is our rope really ten-
dimensional?
Knots in the Rope Hidden Dimensions
Physicists were desperate to solve the problem of making strings move and have string theory work. They
knew string could answer many fundamental questions. Therefore, no one fell off their chairs (well a few
did) when the only way to make strings move was if space had ten dimensions. This is a very new thing.
One way to look at it is to say this is crazy. Theorists gave it a positive spin, like politicians do, that no other
theory ever determined the number of dimensions space should have. So now, we know we have been wrong
all these years.
How can space have ten dimensions when all we experience are three? Only three of the dimensions are
large. The other seven are tiny. The rope to school actually does not have ten dimensions. It is four-
dimensional. Once the distance from the school is fixed, only the angle and distance into the rope and the

28
time are required to locate a bug or any point in the rope. The coordinates just have to be very accurate to
locate something as small as a particular fiber or bug.
String theorys extra dimensions all curl up on each other into tiny, complicated, seven dimensional shapes
that look like knots. The knots are about the size of a string. That is so small that no equipment will ever see
them. A knot of curled up dimensions exists at every point in space. They might be like small chunks of
Swiss cheese or more pretty like Play-Doh with twists and holes. The curled up dimensions exist at every
point in space the way an angular dimension is at every point along the rope. Mathematicians have thought
about spaces with many dimensions long ago and worked out the math to deal with objects having more than
three dimensions. This made the work of physicists a little easier.
We do not notice the knots and bumpiness of space for the same reason we do not notice quantum effects.
They are far too small. Take the period at the end of this sentence. The knots in space are much smaller than
that. Put one hundred small dots across a period. Pick one of these dots and put a million dots across it. Pick
one of those and put a million small dots across it. Better sharpen your pencils. You would have to do this
division of a dot into a million dots five times to get as small as the curled up hidden dimensions of space.}
James finds himself and Qued looking at a large lumpy ball. Qued has a stringed instrument like a guitar-
harp floating over his head.
Qued yells James, come hear in this cave. I want to play you a song on my strinyar.
This isnt a cave. We are at some kind of giant ball of cookie dough. Oh, here is a hole that is something
like a cave. [Figure curled space and James & Qued on it, drawing]
This is actually the curled up dimensions of your universe.
But Qued, that means either its expanded to a very large size or we are very, very small!
Dont worry. I will take care of that later. Now watch and listen as I play at the entrance to this hole. One
song of your world, Merry Had a Little Fuzzy White Quadruped is popular in my world.
James smiles and says, Its not Little Fuzzy White Quadruped. Its Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Well that makes it simpler. I will play the start. Here goes. I hope I do not play wrong notes. No telling
what would happen. Ma ry had a little lamb little lamb little lamb .
Wow. With every note you played, I saw a vibrating string at the cave. They were different lengths,
different colors, and had different numbers of waves. I think they went all the way through this cave to the
other side. Some even wound around the lumpy ball.
Qued replies, Right. Thirteen notes produced thirteen strings. Only four notes were distinct therefore we
saw only four different strings. The low notes were neutrino and electron, lightweight particles. The higher
notes were the heavier up quark and down quark. These are the family of elementary particles occurring
naturally. The notes I played caused the curled up dimensions to ring or resonate in a particular way. That
ringing of the space created the particle. Let us move to another hole. Ill play it again.
James listens then says, Okay, we got the same looking strings but the notes sounded like they were off key,
at a higher pitch.
Look closely. Ill play it again.
Now I see. These strings changed length and may have an extra wiggle.
Right again, more wiggles make them higher pitch. Being higher pitch means more energy and more mass.
From this hole, we got the second family of strings, the mu strings: mu neutrino, mu, and the charm and
strange quarks. In the third hole, we could make the tau family. High energy scattering experiments can
produce the tau and mu families, but they quickly change into the first family particles. Three holes give
three families of particles. Do you see that big bump to the right of you? Sit on it.
James says, There are all kinds of bumps here. You must mean this one. I must be gaining weight. It
squashed right down under me.
Good, hold it down while I play the notes again. Eyes and ears at attention.
Now the song is different. The notes shifted both up and down compared to the first time. It is really a new
melody. It is kind of like the Beatles Maxwells Silver Hammer. There are more distinct notes.
Excellent James. This shows how sensitive strings are to small details of the shape of the curled space.
When you squashed that bump, you made the hidden curled dimensions for a different universe. The extra
notes are elementary strings or particles that do not exist in your universe. It sings a different song than
yours. The elementary particles and even the physics are different.
Wow, I did all that. Awesome.

29
Changes in the hidden dimensions can completely change the universe.
James asks, What makes strings have different charges and behave differently with the strong or weak
force?
Good question. Explaining is hard to do without math, but the details of the vibrations and the curled space
they are in or wind around determine all the properties of the strings. That determines all the elementary
particles and their properties. They, in turn, determine all the properties of the universe.
Well, what about force strings?
This is one of the most amazing things about strings. String explains force and matter in the same way.
Even though they seem very different to us, string theory explains everything as vibrations of string. The
mode of vibration gives mass strings their charge, spin, and mass. Force strings are the same string but
vibrating in a different way, in different dimensions. Climb down and I will try to make a force string.
Heres a good spot, Ill try to make a graviton. [Figure make graviton, drawing]
Qued produced four things that looked like glittery golden bowling pins. He started spinning, striking
repeatedly at four places on the lumpy shape.
Wow, you made a totally different thing, a vibrating loop like a hula-hoop. Waves are moving rapidly
around the loop.
Yes, this is the graviton, a closed string.
Lost in the Hidden Dimensions
Goofer greets Qued in his unique way, Quedball, my alien bro.
Qued replies, May greetings fall over you, Goofer.
I want something from you. James told me there are ten dimensions. I want to know where they are. Ill go
see if the kids there are as cool as me.
The extra dimensions are everywhere, at every point in space. You will find, however, no kids. These
dimensions are unimaginably small, and all wrapped up around each other.
So the extra dimensions are everywhere but theyre nowhere.
Exactly.
I need a little spaced time. If the extra dimensions are so small, then how do they affect us in our three
dimensions? says Goofer.
They dont and thats the problem. They are small enough that there may never be any way to detect them.
The extra dimensions give strings more ways to wiggle and that solves the problem that they could not move
through the big dimensions of space. Wiggling in the hidden dimensions releases the strings from the
requirements that kept strings from moving.
So the tiny dimensions dont have any effect but they affect everything.
Goofer, you have the unique ability to cut right to the point in an obscure way. You may be a Zen master.
Zen Ill see you later.
Qued leaves Goofer to meet with James. Meet isnt quite the word because {James finds himself and Qued
looking at a large lumpy ball. Qued has a stringed instrument like a guitar-harp floating over his head.
Qued yells James, come hear in this cave. I want to play you a song on my strinyar.
This isnt a cave. Were at some kind of giant ball of cookie dough. Oh, here is a hole thats something like
a cave. [Figure curled space and James & Qued on it, drawing]
This is actually the curled up dimensions of your universe.
But Qued, that means either its expanded to a very large size or we are very, very small!
Dont worry. Ill take care of that. Now watch and listen as I play at the entrance to this hole. One song of
your world, Merry had a Little Fuzzy White Quadruped is popular in my world.
James smiles and says, Its not Little Fuzzy White Quadruped. Its Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Well that makes it simpler. Ill play the start. Here goes. I hope I dont play wrong notes. No telling what
would happen. Ma ry had a little lamb little lamb little lamb
Wow. With every note you played, I saw a vibrating string at the cave. They were different lengths,
different colors, and had different numbers of waves. I think they went all the way through this cave to the
other side. Some even wound around the lumpy ball.
Qued replies, Right. Thirteen notes produced thirteen strings. Only four notes were distinct therefore we
saw only four different strings. The low notes were neutrino and electron, lightweight particles. The higher
notes were the heavier up quark and down quark. These are the family of elementary particles occurring

30
naturally. The notes I played caused the curled up dimensions to ring or resonate in a particular way. That
ringing of the space created the particle. Lets move to another hole. Ill play it again.
James listens then says, Okay, we got the same looking strings but the notes sounded like they were off key,
at a higher pitch.
Look closely. Ill play it again.
Now I see. These strings changed length and may have an extra wiggle.
Right again, more wiggles make them higher pitch. Being higher pitch means more energy and more mass.
From this hole, we got the second family of strings, the mu strings: mu neutrino, mu, and the charm and
strange quarks. In the third hole, we could make the tau family. High energy scattering experiments can
produce the tau and mu families, but they quickly change into the first family particles. Three holes give
three families of particles. Do you see that big bump to the right of you? Sit on it.
James says, There are all kinds of bumps here. You must mean this one. I must be gaining weight. It
squashed right down under me.
Good, hold it down while I play the notes again. Eyes and ears at attention.
Now the song is different. The notes shifted both up and down compared to the first time. Its really a new
melody. It is kind of like the Beatles Hey Jude. There are also more distinct notes.
Excellent James. This shows how sensitive strings are to small details of the shape of the curled space. We
just made the hidden curled dimensions for a different universe. The extra notes are elementary strings or
particles that dont exist in our universe. It sings a different song than yours. The elementary particles and
even the physics are different.
Wow, my butt did all that. Awesome.
Changes in the hidden dimensions can completely change the universe.
James asks, What makes strings have different charges and behave differently with the strong or weak
force?
Good question. Explaining is hard to do without math, but the details of the vibrations and the curled space
they are in or wind around determine all the properties of the strings. That determines all the elementary
particles and their properties. They, in turn, determine all the properties of the universe.
Well, what about force strings?
This is one of the most amazing things about strings. String explains force and matter in the same way.
Even though they seem very different to us, string theory explains everything as vibrations of string. Force
strings are the same string but vibrating in a different way, in different dimensions. That in turn gives them
their charge, spin, and mass. Climb down and Ill try to make a force string. Heres a good spot, Ill try to
make a graviton. [Figure make graviton, drawing]
Qued produced four things that looked like glittery golden bowling pins. He started spinning, striking
repeatedly at four places on the lumpy shape.
Wow, you made a totally different thing, a vibrating loop like a hula-hoop. Waves are moving rapidly
around the loop.
Yes, this is the graviton, a closed string.}}
Do closed strings move differently than open strings?
Yes, closed strings move easily and could even cross from our universe to another. Strings with mass have
to stay in our universe.
So are there other universes?
Do you remember the Prime Directive from Star Trek? I must follow it. I am not to interfere with the
natural development of intelligent life.
Well, that cant apply to Goofer. Ill ask him to ask you.
How Is Space Shaping Up?
In order to allow strings to move, space has to have more dimensions. Now that strings can satisfy the
restrictions on their motion, some truly amazing things happen. The strings can now vibrate in many new
ways. Some of the vibration modes produce the elementary particles. Happily, other vibration modes
correspond to the four forces of nature. Especially wonderful is that the gravitational force has a mode just
as the other forces do. This means that gravity will no longer be the oddball force that cannot fit into
quantum mechanics. The equations that predict the motion of strings under the four forces are just the same
as the ones physicists used for the last century. Therefore, if a charged string interacts with an

31
electromagnetic force string, the photon, Maxwells equations still give the correct results. Similarly, string
theory reproduces the equations for the strong, weak, and gravitational forces. The forces were also united in
a profound way since they were all due to vibrations of strings. All of this eluded physicists, even Einstein,
for a century.
In string theory, the energy of the string and the details of the tiny curled space determine the elementary
particles and forces and that determines everything about the universe. Just look out your window and think
about that. String theory derives all of physics for the last 100 years from the geometry of strings and
spacetime. Everything depends on the geometry of our universe. It should not be surprising that for string
theory to accomplish all this requires space to be more complex and have hidden dimensions.
Physicists, programmers, and mathematicians have constructed drawings that suggest the look of these
spaces. No one knows which arrangement is correct. The curled space can have holes. Every hole produces a
unique family of particles. The vibration of strings in the curled space defines the all of the properties of the
particles.
These are attempts to show what the curled up dimensions look like,

however, these are 2

dimensional views of a 7
dimensional space.

This is a big problem in string theory. Like all theories, string theory has to prove itself by giving correct
results for known data, the elementary particles, and by correctly predicting something new. Since the
properties of the elementary particles depend on the shape of the space, you first have to know the geometry
of the curled space. This is especially hard. You cannot sit outside a tiny knot and look it over like Qued and
James did. Therefore, we have to look at the results, the elementary particles. To understand the space you
must understand the elementary particles but to understand the elementary particles you have to understand
the hidden curled space. This is where physicists have been stuck for thirty years.
Before strings, experimenters were the heroes in physics. Relativity and quantum mechanics both came from
experiments that did not fit classical physics. String theory started with the thoughts of theorists.
Experimenters had no evidence of extra dimensions or strings and still do not. Some physicists have been
able to work backwards from the properties of the elementary particles to what types of curled shapes could
produce them. They got fair agreement but this is not very satisfying because the big promise of string
theory is to match nature without having to fit physical constants or hidden dimensions?

Use Your Brains Branes

While investigating the dimensions of spacetime in string theory, something unexpected popped up: branes.
Branes, short for membranes, are lower-dimension spaces lying in a higher dimension space. We are familiar
with some branes in our world. For example, a two brane is a surface, like a parking lot surface. You can call
your homework a 2-brane. A zero-brane, a no-braner, is a point. A 1-brane is a string. A 3-brane is a volume.
A 4-brane is a 4-brane. Well, it is a four-dimensional space that is hard to visualize or sense. Branes covers
them all. Our universe could be inside a brane just as we have 1-, 2-, and 3-branes inside our space.
Imagine a soda straw with a fat orange bug inside. It does not have enough room to turn around. All it can do
is go forwards and back. It lives in a one-dimensional world. The only dimension is how far it is in the straw.

32
The bugs universe is also finite; it has a measurable size. It also has ends. If he goes beyond an end, he falls
out of his universe into one with more dimensions.
A soda straw is an example of one brane inside another. If we put the bug on the outside of the straw, do not
worry. The bug has very sticky feet. We have moved it into a two dimensional world. It can go back and
forth as before but now it can also go around. This bug universe is also finite. However, in the round
direction, it has no ends, no boundary. If the bug goes far enough in the round dimension, it gets back to
where it started. There is no boundary but that direction in space is not infinite. This is like our universe. It is
finite but has no boundaries. A rocket launched in any direction would come back in about one hundred
billion years from the opposite direction.
The bugs universe illustrates again the idea of large dimensions and small curled dimensions. If our straw
was miles long and we stood back from it, we would think the bug is in a world with one large dimension.
We would not be able to see the tightly curled circular dimension around the straw. Note that at every point
along the large dimension we have a curled dimension. This is similar to our space. We have four large
dimensions of spacetime, and at every point, we also have seven curled dimensions.
We can make the long soda straw more like our universe by bending it so that the two ends come together.
Then the ant would be in a universe that is finite but without ends in all directions, having one large and one
small curled dimension. The bugs large dimension curves so slightly that the bug never knows. Our four-
dimensional spacetime is similar to the bugs two-dimensional space. Gravity from all the mass in our
universe warps our space into a curve. Our universe is finite and has no boundaries like the bugs straw.
Other branes may share our space but not be detectable. The rule for strings in a brane is that open strings,
strings with their ends free, cannot escape that brane. All strings with mass and all force strings, except the
graviton, are open. They are stuck inside their brane. There could be another brane, another universe, just
one mm from your nose and you would not know it. [Figure James and Qued, photos] How can that be true?
We see and feel by receiving photons. However, their photons stick to their brane and ours stick on ours.
Weak and strong forces are stuck in the same way. Since all the strings with mass are also stuck, we cannot
signal them by throwing a brick with a note tied on it. The only particle that crosses brane boundaries is the
graviton. Therefore, a nearby brane is invisible, undetectable, and intangible. It may be as hard to prove
there are other branes as it is to detect that angry duck on your head.
Gravitons, the closed gravitational force strings, are different. They can leak out of their brane. Some think
this may be the reason that gravity is so much weaker than the other forces. Our graviton particles leak
away. Gravity is not only weak. When masses are billions of light-years apart, gravity is even weaker than
classical theory calculates. What could overcome the gravitational pull of our universe? If there were
another universe (brane) next to ours, then the mass in the nearby brane would attract our galaxies. Their
gravitons leak into our brane and pull on our galaxies. If gravitational waves exist and we knew how to
make them, they could be a signal. They are so weak, however, that many experiments have failed to detect
gravitational waves or gravitons from events as dramatic as supernovas and colliding galaxies. Another
explanation would be a force working opposite to gravity. This is the favored explanation. This is dark
energy.
One possible way to start the Big Bang, the start of the universe, is by branes colliding. String theorists
struggle to understand branes because of these interesting possibilities.
String Break! With your thumb and finger, hold both ends of a whole, raw piece of spaghetti. This is
a stiff string like the ones in string theory. Holding the ends, slowly bend the spaghetti until it breaks.
It almost always breaks into three piecesnot two. Try it again. Weird?

Look Through Walls with Axions

Axions are predicted uncharged strings, many times heavier than a proton. Axions and photons of light
convert into each other when they pass through a magnetic field. To see [Figure axions magnets wall,
illustration] through a wall, you need a magnet on each side of the wall. Let light from an object shine
through the first magnetic field. Some of the photons convert to axions. Axions pass easily through the wall
in fact they can pass through miles of walls. As the axions go through the magnet on the other side, some
become light again allowing you to see an object through the wall. Several experimenters have tried this, but
results were not conclusive. Another experiment will use the Earths magnetic field to see if sunlight

33
converts to axions that then pass through the Earth and convert to light again on the dark side. In other
words, the experiment will try to see the sun through the Earth.
Supersymmetry
Many things have symmetry. Symmetry means you manipulate an object and what you get is an object very
similar to what you started with. If you look at a right-handed glove in a mirror, you see a left-handed glove.
If you look at that image in another mirror, it is back to looking right-handed. There is symmetry in nature,
music, art, and mathematics. The universe is very symmetric. In fact, all physical symmetries that physicists
can imagine do exist. In other words, the universe is as symmetrical as it can be. Each physical symmetry
results in a corresponding law of physics. This feels right and appeals to our sense of beauty.
Mathematicians discovered a brand new type of physical symmetry involving spinning objects in a higher
dimensional space. Physicists noticed that this symmetry did not have a law. What do you think physicists
did? Ignored it since they already had more math than they could solve? Decided it just did not apply to our
universe? Started looking for that symmetry in the world? Decided that the universe is still beautiful without
that symmetry, so live with it? To guess the right answer, you need to know about a strong belief many
physicists haveif it is not forbidden, then it is allowed. If it could happen, then it does happen in nature.
Physicists have found this to be true many times. One example was the prediction of anti-matter. Seventy
years ago, some nuclear equations gave two answers, negative electrons and positive electrons. Five years
later, positrons, positive electrons, appeared in tracks of cosmic rays. They were the first anti-matter
discovered. For the new spin symmetry, the argument is even stronger. The math of spins allows this
symmetry. To a physicist this symmetry must be real and exist in nature. This is supersymmetry. Strings are
now often called superstrings.
You have to be very confident in your theories and the order in the universe to believe, that If it is not
forbidden, its allowed. Do not try to apply this belief at home or school. It is a sure way to get into trouble.
Mom, can I have a candy bar?
No, dinner is in an hour.
She didnt say I couldnt have a chocolate cake. Yummy.
String theory first modeled strings that carry forces. To include strings with mass requires supersymmetry.
This symmetry involves spin. Spin is a quantum property of elementary particles that resembles ordinary
spin. Force strings have a whole number spin of 0, 1, or 2. Matter strings have spin . The halves are the
jealous strings that will not allow another string of their kind in their energy level. Supersymmetry means
that every whole spin string has a half spin partner with the same mass. If you do the supersymmetry spin
transformation, you change the spin and a force string becomes a mass string or vice versa. The mass of the
partners should be the same, but there are no elementary strings with the same mass. If we were discussing
the mirror reversal symmetry, this is as if we used a mirror to change a left-handed glove to right handed,
and instead it turned into a shoe.
This is the problem with supersymmetry. The spins of the partner particles will differ but their masses
should be equal. However, no strings have the same mass. None of the twelve elementary strings has a
partner. What do you think physicists did? Give up on the idea? Decide the supersymmetric strings exist but
something made them turn out heavy? Start working on super-duper-symmetry? You are getting used to
these questions. Somehow, one partner has become heavy. They are so heavy that we have not seen them
because we do not have accelerators with high enough energy to make them. Making heavy strings requires
an accelerator with very high energy. A particle accelerator, the LHC, in Switzerland may produce them.
Experimental evidence for supersymmetry at this high-energy accelerator would convince most physicists
that string theory is the best model for nature.
String Break! Did you ever try to walk through a wall? Atoms are mostly empty space. Why can you not
go through all that mostly empty space with your mostly empty space? Electrons are jealous and do not
allow another electron in their energy level. The wall electrons were there first and they have filled all
available energy levels. When you push on a wall, the solidness is because your electrons cannot find an
empty energy level. Your electrons are why you cannot get through a wall. Wolfgang Pauli explained this
behavior. He also once told one of his students that his work was so bad that its not even wrong.
Duality
Duality is a very peculiar symmetry of string theory equations. You thought supersymmetry was strange
enough. Here is a simple equation: R + B = C. Let us pretend C is some constant of the universe, like the
34
speed of light. If R = 100 and B = 2 , then C = 102. Now comes the mysterious part. If this was one of the
fundamental equations of string theory and R was a length (for example the size of the universe), then the
string theory equation would still be true if we replace R with 1/R. R is huge so 1/R, the reciprocal, is very
small but the equation is still correct.
Do not try this substitution in algebra class because you will be wrong. Using our original numerical values
should convince you that our little equation does not have duality symmetry. To do this with the numerical
values replace R = 100 with 1/R = 0.01, the equation is no longer true because C our constant of the
universe changes from 102 and becomes 2.01.
Duality means there is a newly discovered connection between the universe as a whole and the size scale of
strings. The same equations hold. The string theory equations show this same behavior with the force
strength constant. Duality symmetry may lead us to deeper levels of understanding. The universe is trying to
tell us something. Large is like small and weak is like strong. The universe begins small and strong, energy
concentrated in a tiny point. Then comes the Big Bang and the universe moves toward large and energy
becomes dilute. Strangely, understanding one extreme helps us understand the other.
All theories are a mix of facts that we use to make the theory fit reality, and facts we find by using the
theory. Which way is more impressive, changing the theory to fit many facts, or finding many facts by
applying the theory? James and Courtney are doing two jigsaw puzzles of the universe. They both have an
idea of how the universe looks. She watches Star Trek and James watches the Hubble telescope. The puzzle
pieces are facts and ideas about the universe. Both begin, and soon Courtney is ahead. James notices that she
is using scissors to trim the pieces of the puzzle to make the pieces fit. James works the old-fashioned way.
James says, Courtney youre cheating.
Im not cheating. These scissors were with my puzzle. Qued left a note telling me I wouldnt get far
without them, says Courtney.
Courtneys puzzle looks messy with some big holes. The red pieces that represent relativity hardly ever
touch the blue pieces of quantum mechanics. After a slow start, James puzzle goes together faster, getting
complex, more beautiful, and bigger. There are only small holes. It roughly looks like a ying-yang symbol.
Which puzzle would you like to work?
Quantum mechanics works much like Courtney and her puzzle. It needs nineteen tools to trim the theory
into a good fit. These are the nineteen constants needed to match mass, charge, force strengths and so on of
the elementary particles. String theory needs only one constant, the stiffness of the string. Courtneys puzzle
gives a picture of the 20th century universe, and she has a big hole in the center. One side has something to
do with relativity, the other quantum mechanics. There are other holes. In James puzzle, quantum
mechanics and relativity wrap around each other and string theory wraps around both. String theory fills the
hole in the center. James has fewer, smaller holes. Courtney agrees that James picture of the universe is
more beautiful than hers is.
String theory can solve the puzzle of the universe. It has only one number to fit, yet relativity and quantum
mechanics are part of it. That is amazing. It took 50 years to develop quantum mechanics and here string
theory gives it free. That is one of string theorys greatest accomplishments. A theory has to agree with all
the old data of previous theories. Since relativity and quantum mechanics both follow from string theory,
agreement is certain. If we lived in weightlessness, we would not know from experience that there was
gravity, but using string theory we could conclude that there is a force of gravity and derive all of its
properties. This is true of all the other forces. That is a big part of the evidence that string theory is a correct
theory of everything.
String theory can do everything and explain everything that physicists have learned in the last hundred
years. Should we burn all physics books and cancel our subscriptions to Scientific American? Do we stop
putting billions of Euros into tunnels in Switzerland? Do we re-train physicists as school bus drivers?
Working out the details and applications of string theory could take hundreds of years. Maxwells equations
are 150 years old, and they still provide many new practical applications. You are stuck with your school bus
driver.
The whole of relativity and 20th century physics follows naturally from string theory. Do you remember
Courtney and the missing paper? Explaining the universe with only one constant is harder than getting a
one-sentence explanation from Courtney. The agreement of string theory with previous work is only a start.
Physicists require a theory to predict new phenomena. Otherwise, it is only making explanations after the

35
fact. Courtney was very good at that. String theory will sometimes be confusing, like quantum mechanics. It
still has all the craziness of quantum mechanics chunkiness, fuzziness, and the observer affecting reality. It
is still controversial. It does a lot, but you have to accept a lot on faith. What you must accept does not make
sense and has not been tested.
Problems with String Theory
Explaining gravity and the whole mess of elementary particles was great. Further progress for the last 20
years has been difficult. If you are beginning to understand science, you must be wondering where the
predictions are. What experiments confirm string theory? For example, how closely can string theory
calculate the mass of the electron from properties of the hidden spaces and the equations of string theory?
That is the problem. String theory is the way to determine elementary particles properties, but there are
several hard problems to solve. First, physicists do not even know the complete set of equations. Second,
some of the equations have not been solved except approximately. Third, we do not know the exact shape of
the hidden dimensions.
To calculate the properties of elementary particles, you need to know which of the possible curled hidden
dimensional spaces our space is. If you know the correct space, you next have to find all the different ways
that vibrating strings can wind around and through it. The curled space will have three holes, since we have
three families of strings. Finally, you calculate all the different ways strings can vibrate. There are actually
an infinite number of ways, but only the lowest energy modes will be stable and have low enough mass to
exist in the world.
Some interpret the fact that we do not know the shape of the hidden dimensions to mean string theory is too
generous. It can predict almost any kind of universe. If atoms were ten times as big as they are, you could
make a few changes in the curled dimensions and string theory would agree. If you wanted the elementary
particles to have only 1% of the weight they have, again a few changes in the hidden dimensions and string
theory would agree. Physicists need something that can correct string theorys ability to agree with crazy
versions of the universe that do not exist. They want it to agree with our crazy universe.
It will take years to derive and solve the correct equations but then the crucial missing information is the size
and shape of our curled dimensions. It is not clear how to solve that problem.
Whats In Your Vacuum?
Atoms, the solar system, the Milky Way, and even the universe are mostly empty space, vacuum. The
vacuum is a problem for string theory. Quantum mechanics found that the vacuum is no longer a lot of
nothing. Its more like a mosh pit where kids throw each other up in the air. There is a better example. It is
like a pot of oatmeal with raisins and split peas boiling on the stove. Splat! A raison anti-raison pair jumps
out. Blop! Pea pairs fly up in a puff of steam. Then they fall back in. [Figure James vacuum oatmeal,
drawing/illustration] This food flying out of the pot is like the virtual strings popping out of the vacuum. If
you could see strings, you would see string anti-string pairs constantly appearing and disappearing back into
the vacuum. The virtual strings popping out of the vacuum are real. They strongly affect particle behavior.
Strings pop out of the vacuum because the vacuum contains energy. Quantum fluctuations of the energy in
small regions of space produce virtual particles.
Quantum mechanics deals with probabilities. When strings interact, all sorts of variations are possible
involving one or more virtual strings appearing during the interaction. To get the right answer you must
consider all possible interactions and add them together. Those with many virtual strings are less likely than
the simpler ones. The answer gets better as more complications are included. Virtual strings change the
interactions between real strings. The real strings can pass them back and forth. A string might decay into
other strings or produce several virtual strings. Considering more variations makes the quantum mechanics
calculations more accurate.
A very simple experiment verified that the vacuum is gushing with particle anti-particle pairs. When two
metal plates are moved close together, there is an unexplained force trying to move the plates even closer.
The force happens because each plates inner surface is partially shielded from the virtual particles. The
strength of the force by quantum mechanics is correct when including virtual particles.
String theory allows many different energies for the vacuum. A real fundamental theory of everything should
predict the vacuum energy. Higher energy is like turning up the heat under our oatmeal. Depending on the
setting, our kitchen and the universe can be very different. Vacuum energy and shape of the hidden
dimensions are connected. You do not want to have to scrape oatmeal off the ceiling. String theory does not

36
give a clue to what vacuum energy is correct. The result is that string theory can describe many very strange
universes besides our own.
Physicists Disagree
Another problem is that no one can ever observe strings. An accelerator would have to be the size of the
Milky Way to slam things together hard enough to make strings. The Klingons would never let it cross their
territory.
It gets worse. So far, physicist cannot test any prediction of string theory. Thousands of physicists work hard
on this problem. One important prediction is supersymmetry, which pairs up force and mass particles. New
particles are required to do this, but none has been found.
Physicists often disagree. They check the assumptions, techniques, and conclusions of every new theory.
They repeat experiments and math. String theory has not made a testable prediction. It requires belief in
strange ideas: seven hidden dimensions, a doubling of the number of strings by supersymmetry, and almost
an infinite number of bizarre universes. This is because there is no handle on the shape of our curly
dimensions and the energy of the vacuum. There is a barrage of books, lectures, and blogs for and against
string theory and string theorists. Some bloggers think string theory has religious significance. Compared to
other physics controversies, this is like the War of the Worlds. Here are some excerpts from the Not Even
Wrong blog of Peter Woit along with some [explanations in brackets].
From the Not Even Wrong Blog of Peter Woit
String theorists try to solve non-existent problems and propose absurd scenarios. They are wasting their
time and ours by working on made up problems instead of the real ones.
Its difficult to figure out whether certain ideas in these papers were proposed seriously or as a satire
[mean kind of humor]. The papers usually disagree with each other in details because they draw different
boundaries between serious statements and jokes [Your papers are a joke and string theorists cannot even
agree on what is funny].
Most farmers, drivers, and supermodels realize that there is a difference between the future and the past.
[Implying string theorists do not and that they are not as smart as supermodels].
These comments are funny, but show there are loud opponents to string theory. There is more emotion
around string theory than other theory. The arguments are louder. Because of the Internet, they are more
public than before. At school, there are the cool kids and everyone else. In physics, it has been cool to be a
string theorist.
Get Down Look Around String Theory
We have been looking at string theory the way someone in a skyscraper looks over a city. Weve seen some
of the big buildings and highways, but none of the details. You cannot know a city very well from 100
stories up. To know string theory really well takes six years of studying math after high school. Much of
string theory is hard to explain in words but easy to explain in math, if you do not count the six years. We
can look at a small piece of real, current string theory research. Below is an excerpt from a current research
article. It gives an idea of how complicated string theory is. The article discusses long, heavy cosmic strings
that may have formed during the Big Bang. Cosmic strings are the opposite of the tiny almost massless
strings that replace elementary particles. They would be light-years long, and contain the mass of many
stars. If cosmic strings interact, they emit radiation, other kinds of strings. The paper calculates what this
radiation might be like.
We know many physicists disagree with string theory, and cosmic strings are only a possibility if string
theory is correct. So why would these three Russian physicists figure out how these maybe strings interact
and maybe make radiation? This is an important part of science, filling in all the details. Physicists dig
through all aspects of possible ideas to see if they can find something that definitely says strings exist and
have these properties or they do not. The box below is a part of a paper published electronically at the end of
2006. Look it over and you will agree that string theory is complicated.
Even the title, Dilaton and Axion Bremsstrahlung from Collisions of Cosmic (Super) Strings needs some
explanation. Axions and dilatons are unverified string vibrations. Both relate to gravity. Axions are heavy
strings without charge that may be important in cosmology. Bremsstrahlung is German for braking radiation
produced if cosmic strings collide. Your brakes get hot when you slow down. Therefore, bremsstrahlung for
your bicycle or car is heat, infrared radiation. The article is typical, showing that mathematics and English

37
are the universal languages of scientists. The last equation is the equation of motion for strings. In our
human sized world, the equation of
motion is just F = ma; force equals
mass times acceleration.

Dilaton and Axion

Bremsstrahlung from Collisions
of Cosmic (Super) Strings
arXiv: hep-th (0612271v1 26 Dec
2006 E Yu Melkumova1, D V
Galtsov2 and K Salehi3
Department of Physics, Moscow
State University, Moscow,
Russia. Full article at
arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0612271
String Theory Summary
In string theory, all elementary
particles are tiny vibrating strings.
They vibrate in ten spatial
dimensions instead of the three we
know. Each elementary particle
including force particles are a
particular mode of vibration of a
string in this space. Consequently,
string makes everything. Since
strings are as small as anything can
be, they cannot have any internal
parts and we have found the most
basic thing in the universe.
If you start with string theory, you
can derive quantum mechanics and relativity. After 100 years, quantum mechanics and relativity are
compatible. Strings are small but not zero sized so string theory does not give the infinite results found in
quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics calculations say the mass of a particle is as much as that of a
Buick. String theory also solves the problem quantum mechanics has with gravity. It naturally has the
graviton, force particle for gravity. Gravity becomes just another force and the forces are united (explained
in one way) as vibrations of strings. Supersymmetry predicts that there are heavy partner strings to all the
twelve strings we know. The Large Hadron Collider may have enough energy to make them.
String theorists are working to define the shape of the hidden dimensions, and determine the energy of the
vacuum. Without this information, string theory can describes all kinds of crazy universes. Some have more
forces; others turn quickly to black holes. Probing the hidden dimensions with elementary particles requires
higher energies than we can imagine. Nothing yet points to one set of curly dimension or universe being
ours. This makes some physicists speculate that there actually are many universes. Remember if it is not
forbidden, its allowed.
Physicists and mathematicians are making progress in discovering and solving the string equations. A
possible source of confirmation of string theory is the field of cosmology, study of the universe.

Cosmology Mom, Whered You Put My Universe

Cosmology is the study of the universe, not a small part like an atom, or a big piece like the Earth, but the
whole thing. The most striking thing about the universe is that it is mostly empty space. There is a lot of
space between the stars and even more between galaxies. Even on the atomic and sub-atomic scales, we
found next to nothing and a whole lot of empty space. The only size scale where the universe looks full is
our size scale. Our size scale is full of ants, rocks, trees, buildings, cars and so on. We are at the best size to
enjoy a complex, interesting local environment. Being human sized does, however, make it hard to study the

38
universe since it is 10+26 times bigger than we are. It also makes it hard to study strings, which are 10 -35 times
smaller than we are.
The most basic question about the universe is why there is anything. That answer is beyond our
understanding and may always be. Cosmology does answer related questions. Does the universe change? If
it does, is there a beginning and an end? Fifty years ago, many astronomers thought the universe was
unchanging, always was, and always will be. Now we know that 13.7 billion years ago there was no
universe, as we know it. Then tremendous energy and matter was concentrated in a point. We know there
was a gigantic explosion called the Big Bang. It shot out all of the matter and energy at high speed. The
universe is expanding still. Even though the Big Bang was a unique event at the far beginning of time,
nuclear physics correctly calculates the mix of elements found in the early universe.
Cosmology has discovered two new puzzles, dark energy, and dark matter. String theory may solve these
puzzles. It affects cosmology in other ways and cosmology may verify string theory.
Scientific Creation Story The Big Bang
It began 13.7 billion years ago. That we know for sure. The usual assumption is that the universe was just
vacuum. Maybe all that existed was a single point. All eleven dimensions were tightly curled up. All of
space was the size of the tiny curled dimensions. Matter did not exist. Then this tiny region of vacuum filled
with massive amounts of energy and about a bowling ball weight of matter. It exploded. This was the Big
Bang.
There is no agreement on where the initial matter and energy came from. One idea is that we are
experiencing part of an everlasting cycle in a universe that existed before the Big Bang. We do know that it
starts at a super high temperature of 10+32 or one hundred quadrillion quadrillion degrees. The forces we
know blended into one single force.
At 10-45 seconds, an almost unimaginably short time, the eleven dimensions split into two groups. A group
of four expanded rapidly becoming spacetime. The other seven stayed curled up as the miniature extra
dimensions of string theory. There were small density and temperature fluctuations caused by quantum
uncertainty. These froze in place while the universe grew rapidly to the size of a ball. This was the big burp,
called inflation. Space expanded so rapidly that the speed was greater than the speed of light. This is not a
violation of relativity because relativity does not set limits on how fast space expands. It limits how fast
matter can move.
The fireball cooled and expanded as energy converted to super heavy exotic strings, which we will never see
on Earth. It then became a soup of gluons and quarks. It was not until 10-6 seconds, a millionth of a second,
that protons and neutrons formed. By one second, neutrons and protons were able to start sticking together
by nuclear fusion producing deuterium, helium, and lithium, the lightest elements. Even though the universe
was hotter than the interior of a star, it was pitch black everywhere. Electrons changing orbit produce light,
but it was still too hot for electrons to stay in orbit around atoms. Other particles would knock them free.
Whew, that was a lot happening in one second.
At three minutes, the amounts of the lightest elements stopped increasing because the universe had cooled
too much for fusion to continue. The calculated concentration of the lightweight elements matches that
observed in the early universe. The universe kept cooling and expanding. The next big event was at 300,000
years. The temperature dropped below 3000 degrees K. This is cool enough for electrons to start circling
atoms. When that happened, the universe was no longer dark. The electrons jumped into different orbits and
emitted light.

Evolution of the Universe after the Big Bang

Event Description Time
Start A point containing matter and vast amounts of energy 0.0
Inflation Nearly instantaneous expansion to golf ball size 10-37 seconds
Gluons Gluon and quark soup forms < 10-6 seconds
Nucleons Cool enough for protons and neutrons to form 10-6 seconds
39
Fusion Nucleons stick together making heavier elements 1 second
Fusion ends The fireball temperature is less than the suns temperature 3 minutes
Light Electrons attach to nuclei and emit first light 300,000 years
Stars Gravity concentrates matter to form stars 10+8 years
Galaxies Stars attract each other into galaxies 10+9 years
Earth Dust and gases in the solar system form the Earth 4.5 billion years ago
Life on Earth Very primitive organisms form 3.5 billion years ago
Humans Our ancestors appear in Africa 100,000 years ago
The material from the Big Bang kept expanding. The combination of quantum fluctuation lumps and
inflation work to give the distribution of matter that we observe in the universe. Gravity made the lumps get
bigger, forming stars, galaxies, and superclusters of galaxies.
Fusion in stars produced the heavier elements like silicon, oxygen, nitrogen, and iron. These elements were
then available to make rocky iron cored planets found around later generations of stars. Our sun is one of
those stars. Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. The first life developed after a billion years. Life continued
to evolve. Now it is incredibly diverse and found almost everywhere. Humans have been around for only
100,000 years.
This is very different from the creation stories at the start of this book. It follows from observations.
Thousands of scientists participated. Scientists checked and criticized results of other scientists. Who was
taking data 13.7 billion years ago? We are. Can you guess how we are seeing the early universe? The light
we see from the most distant galaxies started on the way to us 13 billion years ago and shows us what things
were like then. The cosmic microwave background tells us what the universe was like 300,000 years after
the Big Bang when light first was able to escape from the fireball. The ancient creation stories filled our
need for answers when no other answers were available.
Goofer says to Qued, What up, Quedman? Ive been wondering. Where did the Big Bang happen? I want to
go there to see if theres any rad stuff left hanging on the trees. You know, stuff I can sell to buy a
motorcycle.
Goofer, the Big Bang happened everywhere. It even happened in your toilet.
Thats soooo far out. Who was sitting on it?
Qued replied, At the Big Bang all of space, the whole universe, was a tiny ball smaller than an electron.
That space expanded explosively and is still expanding. Therefore, every bit of space, matter, and energy in
your universe was in the Big Bang. Since everything was this point, the Big Bang happened everywhere.
This is similar to why the universe seems to be expanding from every point in space. Space itself expands as
the universe grows.
Whoa Quedball, too much info. Youre always good for a couple of Gigs more than my input buffer can
hold. All I know is Im going to sit on the pot very carefully.
You can still listen to and even see the Big Bang on TV. The Big Bang filled the universe with bright light.
Most of the light kept flying across space. Since then, the universe has expanded many, many times and that
visible light stretched with the universe to longer wavelengths, becoming microwaves. TVs detect
microwaves. If you turn on your analog TV in between stations, you hear static. Some static is from our
machines and electronics but most is from outer space from the Big Bang. If you do not have an analog TV,
listen to the Big Bang on your AM radio. The static comes from all directions.
This is the cosmic microwave background. It is what is left of the flash from the Big Bang. Several satellites
have accurately mapped the microwave background. At first, it looked uniform. With better detectors, the
satellites found small changes in intensity corresponding to the quantum fluctuations.
Tools of Astronomy
How do we know there was a Big Bang? All astronomers have to work with is the feeble light from the stars.
They have great tools to measure and analyze it. There are huge telescopes, including the orbiting Hubble
telescope. They found that supernovas, stars blowing up, are all about the same brightness. Now if they find
a distant supernova in another galaxy, from its brightness, they can tell how far away its galaxy is. You do
the same thing when you guess how far away a firefly is by how bright it is. Dim ones are far away.
Astronomers can map much of the universe because supernovas are bright and happen often. To go further,
to the edge of the universe, they needed something brighter, quasars. Quasars are young galaxies wrapped
around super-sized black holes. Would you like a super-sized black hole with that order of fries? Quasars

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also have nearly equal brightness. They are the brightest objects in the universe since the Big Bang. If a
quasar were 30 light-years away from us, it would be brighter than the sun. The sun is light-minutes away.
By comparison, Sirius, the brightest star is only nine light years away.
Supernovas and quasars are the astronomers fireflies. They carefully measure their brightness to find the
distances to everything they see. Even though light travels very fast, the universe is so big that it takes nine
years for light to reach us from Sirius. The distance light travels in a year is a light year. When we observe
that star, we are looking nine years into the past. Some quasars are 13 billion light-years away. The light
getting to us now, left soon after the Big Bang.
Besides brightness, it is easy to check the color of star light. Remember from relativity that if a star is
moving toward you it looks bluer. If it is moving away, it is redder. Astronomers determine the color very
accurately by spreading the light into all its colors, as a prism does. The amount of the color change gives
the speed of the star. The result of looking at millions of galaxies is that all of the galaxies are red shifted.
They are moving away from us. The further away they are, the faster they are moving away.
Oh no! Does this mean we are back at the center of the universe? No. If you blow up a spotted balloon,
every spot moves away from every other. The distance a spot moves away is larger if it starts further away. If
you do not have a balloon, you can put equal spaced spots on a rubber band. Take a piece of lined paper.
Mark the locations of the spots onto the paper. Stretch the rubber band perpendicular to the lines so the lines
can tell you how much a spot moved and its separation. You will find that the separation between spots has
increased. Space, the rubber band, has expanded. The amount spots move away from one end of the rubber
band is most for the spots furthest away from that end. If you cannot imagine this kind of expansion of a
three-dimensional space, you are not alone. Space is expanding in three directions, like the rubber band
expands in one direction. All parts of space are moving away from all other parts. There is no center of the
expansion. The expansion of the universe is the best evidence for the Big Bang. Astronomers on another
galaxy are also seeing red shifts. They find we are moving away from them at the same speed as they are
moving away from us. Confused? You may have to take a good look at your polka dot balloon or rubber
band.
Another piece of evidence for the Big Bang is deuterium. The hydrogen atom is an electron circling around a
proton. The strong force can bind a neutron to a proton by gluons carrier of the strong force. With an
electron orbiting the pair, we get a deuterium atom. Deuterium is all over the universe, but stars are not hot
enough to make deuterium. Only the Big Bang can.
The Hubble telescope has produced enough scans to put together a picture of the whole universe. A good
model of the universe is a pile of soap bubbles, all different sizes. The air in the bubbles represents empty
space. The stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters are the soapy liquid. The soapy liquid wiggles through the
empty space sometimes thick and sometimes thin. Some of the bubble walls are thick like the occasional
walls of galaxies in the universe. The Milky Way is part of the Virgo cluster. The largest super cluster is the
Great Wall, which reaches one-tenth the way across the universe. That is also the size of the largest hole,
nearly empty region, of the universe.
Black Holes
Relativity predicted black holes. They happen whenever a heavy sun runs out of nuclear fuel. Then there is
nothing to prevent gravity from squashing all of the sun into a small space, a black hole. They are black
because gravity near the hole is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. The escape velocity from a
black hole is greater than the speed of light. Black holes are invisible. Astronomers detect black holes by the
emissions of matter pulled into the hole. It is superheated and shines brightly.
At first, people thought this was a just a mathematical mistake. Now, we know that most galaxies have black
holes. The center of the Milky Way has a very large black hole. Intense black hole gravity sucks in any
nearby matter making the black hole larger and its gravity even stronger. In billions of years, most of the
Milky Way will end up in the black hole. Growing larger is what black holes do best. Their gravity sucks
nearby mass into the hole making its gravity and size increase.
Black holes can also be lightweight and very small, the size of an atom. Maybe the new LHC accelerator
will have enough energy to make miniature black holes. Would the Earth end up sucked into the miniature
black hole? Should we stop work on the large LHC accelerator? Stephen Hawking, a physicist paralyzed
with ALS, works on black hole theory. He found that black holes are not totally black. Remember virtual
strings? They form everywhere including at the edge of black holes. Sometimes only one string of the pair

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falls back into the hole and the other escapes. This makes black holes hairy. These escaping strings of weak
radiation, the hair, make black holes directly visible. Large black holes radiate very weakly but subatomic
black holes radiate intensely. This radiation energy has to come from the black hole by converting its mass
into energy. Therefore, a subatomic black hole evaporates quickly. The LHC will not create a black hole that
can gobble the Earth, if Hawkings theory is correct.
If a black hole is rapidly spinning, then instead of a hole, it can form a black ring. This can only happen if
there are hidden dimensions. Finding a black ring would confirm string theory. Astronomers have not found
one.
Black holes challenge theory because mass in a black hole should compress into a point at their center. That
point would have infinite density. Infinity means a big mistake. String theory to the rescue. Most physicists
believe calculations that show a string is the smallest possible object in the universe. So one massive string
could be at the center of every black hole. It would be very dense, but it not infinite.
In some ways, black holes behave like elementary particles. The characteristics of both are their mass, spin,
and charge. There is a deeper connection through string theory. String theory can model certain kinds of
black holes. String theory shows that combining branes in the right way creates a black hole. String theory
implies that black hole centers do not get smaller than a string. The extreme conditions in the center of a
black hole drastically affect the curled dimensions. In fact, some believe that if the curled up dimensions
compressed to a point in a black hole, the universe would end. It was not hard to decide that string theory is
correct that black holes do not collapse to a point. We are all still here and the universe has many black
holes.
Ice, water, and steam are the three phases of water. Some theorists propose that black holes are related to
elementary particles in the same way ice is related to water, a change of phase. Temperature determines the
phase of water. The shape of the curled dimensions inside an object determines if it is a black hole or an
elementary particle.
The biggest accomplishment of string theory of black holes is that it correctly gives their entropy and the
change in entropy caused by matter falling into a black hole. Entropy is a mathematical way to measure
randomness. Entropy always increases. This was puzzling applied to black holes because they seem very
non-messy, non-random. Our mental picture of a black hole is a neat blacker than black sphere. If black
holes were all that neat then a basic law of physics would be violated. The entropy of the universe would go
down whenever anything fell into a black hole. All processes have to make the universe more random and
messier. This makes the universe have higher entropy. An analysis of black holes using string theory gave
the correct entropy and verified that the entropy of the whole universe always goes up.
Dark Matter
If the universe is heavy enough, gravity will eventually slow the galaxies, stop them, and pull them back
together. This is just like throwing a ball straight up. Earths gravity pulls down any object moving up at less
than the escape velocity, 25,000 mph. If we could throw that fast, the ball would continue rising and leave
the Earth. If we were in space, standing on a small meteor, a boulder, we would not have to throw so hard.
The boulder would not have enough mass to pull the ball back after we throw it. The escape velocity of a
boulder is low.
The universe also has an escape velocity. The escape velocity for the universe depends on how heavy it is. If
the universe is heavy enough, the galaxies will slow and reverse. The movement back together would
continue until all matter is back again in a gigantic black hole. It is the big crunch. This made astronomers
estimate the weight of all the matter in the universe to see if there was enough to turn around the galaxies.
They calculated the weight using Newtons equations. Thirty years ago, the calculated weight of the universe
was not enough to pull the galaxies back in. The galaxies would continue moving away from each other
forever. That result has changed.
Astronomers have known for thirty years that there was something wrong with our Milky Way galaxy. Big
telescopes located the stars, dust clouds, and even the black hole at the center. They knew the stars far from
the center would move much slower than the ones closer to the center. The planets move this same way.
However, they found that the distant stars in the Milky Way are moving faster. This is a major
embarrassment. From these results, galaxies could never form, and the Milky Way should fly apart. They
then looked at the behavior of clusters of galaxies. Astronomers measured their motions and positions. They
also were moving too fast. This was a calculation that even a freshman college student could make. The only

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explanation is that there is a lot more matter that we cannot see in the galaxies and clusters of galaxies. That
matter does not emit light. To us it is invisible dark matter. Yes, this sounds silly, but remember, astronomers
have been thinking about this for 30 years. Sometimes when the good explanations do not work, you have to
get silly.
With this idea, astronomers analyzed how much dark matter would make the galaxies behave as they do.
They conclude that there is five times as much dark matter as normal matter. It seems to collect in the outer
edges of galaxies. Most is in the largest structures in the universe, the clusters of galaxies. Normal dark
things like black holes, neutron stars, rocks, dust, burned out stars, and lost planets may account for a few
percent of the dark matter. Astronomers started talking about WIMPS, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles
that no one has seen. No joke, WIMPS. (You cannot make this stuff up.) Radioactive decay produces
neutrinos. They appear to have no mass. Maybe they have just a little and collect around the galaxies. Other
possible sources of dark matter come from string theory. Supersymmetry predicts heavy versions of all the
strings we already know. The heavy neutralinos, the supersymmetric partner of the neutrino, should behave
like a heavy neutrino and could make up dark matter. Another particle from string theory, axions, might
make up part of dark matter. The LHC accelerator may be able to produce both. Cosmic strings, heavy
strings from the Big Bang, are also a possibility. We can only guess what dark matter is. What do you guess?
Maybe it is that stack of turtles.
Dark Energy
With dark matter, the universe has enough gravitational pull to slow and turn around the galaxies. Before
you go outside to look for blue, falling galaxies, there is one more thing. A strange new thing, first suspected
in the 1990s, is dark energy. After the Big Bang, matter exploded into the universe. Adding in the dark
matter makes the universe heavy enough to turn around the galaxies. Therefore, distant galaxies, right now,
should be slowing down. Surprise. Galaxies are speeding up. Physicists are guessing how this can happen.
Gravity could become repulsive at great distances. Maybe some other unknown repulsive force, like a
pressure, pushes matter away, expanding the universe. Since the electromagnetic force is so much stronger
than gravity, it would not take much charge to push the galaxies apart. The equations of physics are
symmetrical to sign of charge. Therefore, the universe should be electrically neutral. Einstein had a constant
in his equation for gravity that produces a repulsive force. He put it in because everyone at that time thought
that the universe was eternal. He adjusted the constant so that the universe would continue expanding slowly
forever.
This is dark energy. None of these explanations makes astronomers happy. They are embarrassed to realize
that all these years they only were aware of 5% of the universe. If the dark energy were converted to matter
using E = mc2, then there would be three times as much matter from dark energy than from normal matter.
Dark energy connects with string theory. It comes from the energy of the vacuum. If string theory is to
become the theory of everything, it should predict the amount of dark energy and dark matter, and explain
why it is there. The dark energy appears to be very small and positive.
A nice property of supersymmetry is that it predicts near zero vacuum energy. That agrees with our universe.
If string theory calculates the correct vacuum energy and supersymmetric strings appear, it would be a
strong confirmation of string theory. This would explain dark energy and dark matter.
Speculations
While most high-energy physicists research and debate string theory, some have gone on to ideas that are
more controversial. Some of these ideas are at the frontiers of scientific thought. They are partly
philosophical and perhaps outside the realm of science. Because of that, many are difficult to understand.
These ideas may or may not end up being accepted.
Cosmic Strings
Besides possibly explaining dark energy and dark matter, string theory can affect cosmology in other ways.
A cosmic string would be a gigantic, super heavy string that may be light-years long but only the width of a
proton. They may have formed at the beginning of the Big Bang, when the state of the fireball was rapidly
changing. They arise from a kind of phase change similar to the cracks made when water freezes. Cosmic
strings would form when the Big Bang cools.
The suns gravity bends light rays if their path lies close to the sun. This was the discovery that confirmed
relativity. The same bending happens in deep space if a light ray from a distant star passes near a heavy
galaxy. The star light bends slightly blurring or even doubling the image of the star. A cosmic string would

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be heavy enough to bend the light of distant stars if the light passes near the cosmic string. This is a
gravitational lens. Astronomers know many. If a distant galaxy, a cosmic string, and Earth were exactly in a
line, the cosmic strings gravity would also split the image of the distant galaxy into what would look like
two blurry galaxies. [Figure cosmic line up, illustration] These distorted images do not last forever because
the stars, galaxies, and cosmic strings are moving relative to each other and get out of alignment. Since
cosmic strings would be so thin, the distorted images they would produce will last for a very short time. If a
double image quickly disappears, that would be proof that a thin cosmic string passed between Earth and the
distant galaxy. When galaxies cause lensing, the lens is long lasting since galaxies are much wider. Several
astronomers report examples of this kind of cosmic string lensing. They have to be confirmed by other
observers.
Cosmic strings would look like irregular lace covering the fireball just after the Big Bang. Super clusters of
galaxies also look a lot like lace. The lace of cosmic strings, soon after the Big Bang, may have provided the
starting point for todays super clusters.
What Is Space?
This is the first time in history that we can ask such a fundamental question. We tend to believe space is
constant. In classical physics, space and time never changed. They were the frame in which we hung our
picture of reality. When a picture is interesting, no one notices the frame. Scientists did not notice space and
time. We cannot ignore space and time anymore. Spacetime now is complicated. Einstein joined space and
time together by special relativity. General relativity showed that mass warps spacetime. Quantum
mechanics showed that empty space is not empty; virtual strings continuously pop into and out of existence.
Empty space is full of energy.
In addition, string theory says space has seven tightly curled hidden dimensions. Having more dimensions
makes for more questions. Why did only three space dimensions and time become large? What would the
world be like with more large dimensions?
Some physicists speculate that empty space may be full of strings. In quantum mechanics, the theoretical
Higgs particle gives elementary particles their mass. Pushing through strings could be the reason elementary
strings have mass. It takes some force to push the space strings out of the way just as it also takes some force
to move through a crowd.
Our ideas about space could also be out of date because of quantum entanglement. Entangled particles
respond to each other as if there were no space in between. We now know that matter bends space. Can
space distort in ways that are more dramatic? Can it tear, form holes and reattach?
Theoretical physicists are studying all of these ideas. There is no agreement on answers to these questions
about space. This work is very important and there is an expectation that explanations would help the
development of string theory. String theory claims that all the properties of the forces and elementary
particles are the result of one kind of string vibrating different ways in a ten-dimensional space.
Wormholes
Wormholes have moved out of science fiction and into physics. These are distortions and tears of spacetime
that could allow for travel faster than light, or even travel through time. Astronomers believe there is
intelligent life on thousands of stars of the Milky Way. They are likely to be so far away that it would take
many lifetimes to travel to their star. The speed of light is the absolute speed limit for anything moving in the
universe. Therefore, without wormholes, we probably never will meet an alien. Wormholes have been in
science fiction for 50 years and now one or two serious physics papers appear every month discussing
wormholes.
You can make a model of a wormhole from a large piece of balloon. Fix the corners of the balloon then push
up from the underside, bend your finger, and touch the balloon surface with the tip of your finger. That loop
is almost a wormhole. The last step, which is nearly impossible, is to cut a hole at your fingertip and a
similar hole in the balloon. Join the edges together and you have a wormhole. This is similar to a hollow
handle of a pitcher. [Figure wormhole, illustration] To make a real wormhole, the same stretch, distortion,
tear, and reconnection would happen to spacetime itself. No one has shown that this is possible. When you
move through a wormhole, you end up suddenly in another part of spacetime. If wormholes exist, they could
be pathways through time as well as space. A black hole distorts space most powerfully.

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Time travel generates possible paradoxes. For example, you could go back in time and do something that
would prevent your using a time machine. Even more dramatic you could do something that prevents your
ever being born. What would happen then?
Loop Quantum Gravity
Loop quantum gravity is a new theory in competition with string theory. It is nowhere near being a theory of
everything as is string theory, but it does have some interesting features. In the sub-atomic world, everything
is chunky and quantized. Why not space and time? We think both are smooth. However, at a very small
scale, could they be chunky without our knowing it? Physicists have a guess of the size of these quanta. To
match well to quantum mechanics, space would have a length quantum of 10-35 meters. You might
remember that this is the length of a string. Time quanta would be 10-47 seconds. One followed by 47 zeros,
or put another way, it would take one hundred quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion time quanta to make just
one second. At the speed of light, it takes a quantum of time to travel a quantum of length.
Like string theory, loop quantum gravity makes quantum mechanics compatible with gravity. It also solves
the black hole shrinking to a point. The conditions in a black hole are extreme. However, if the radius goes
to zero; the gravitational force and density become infinite. Does that sound familiar? String theory solved
problems of zero radius and infinity for quantum mechanics. The solution was to replace zero radius
particles with something incredibly small but not zero, a string. Loop quantum does a similar thing by
replacing continuous space with space quanta. It also limits the amount of energy and mass that a space
quantum can contain. Therefore, chunks of space in a black hole would fill until stuffed and then other space
quanta would fill. These space quanta would also generate a strong repulsive force. This would prevent
formation of a point with all the matter of the black hole. It is possible this would result in the big bounce.
What Is Time?
Time may be the biggest mystery. What is time? Why is there time? How can time be so different from
space dimensions and still be tangled up with them by relativity? Why do we know the past but not the
future? Did time have a beginning? Will it end? Does time change smoothly or is there a smallest unit of
time like the tick of a clock? Can there be a universe without time? If you have ideas about these questions,
then you are doing better than most physicists are. Physicists use time in all their work, but infrequently
think about these basic questions. Physics equations are all valid with time running backwards.
String theory gives new ideas about time. String theory and loop quantum gravity imply there is a smallest
unit of time 10-47 seconds, the time it takes light to travel the length of a string. Perhaps space and time start
with the Big Bang. Perhaps they did not. If something caused the Big Bang, then there had to be time before
the Big Bang. A collision of branes can start the Big Bang.
Maybe the universe endlessly repeats a cycle of Big Bang, and then expansion followed by contraction
resulting in all the galaxies falling inward. They soon would form a giant black hole. That is the big crunch.
This is where we have to speculate. What if something reverses the big crunch like gravity reversed the
expansion? We then get the big bounce, which could look like another Big Bang, and this cycle could repeat
forever. String theory can cause the big bounce by limiting the black hole to the size of a string. Calculations
then show that a bounce would happen. Another way to reverse the big crunch is loop quantum gravity.
Loop quantum gravity claims a volume of space can only hold so much energy. When the volume containing
the black hole gets full enough, the next Big Bang could happen.
The energy of the Big Bang is so high that no theory knows how to handle it. Big advances in string theory
will likely come from the study of black holes. If the Large Hadron Collider has enough energy to make a
microscopic black hole, studying it would be a good test of modern theories.
Some versions of string theory predict tachyons. These strings travel faster than the speed of light but
backward in time. They have other strange properties. If you give them energy, they slow down. They have
imaginary mass. Most physicists change a theory when it makes tachyons. Some physicists still work with
these theories to investigate tachyon behavior in more detail. Tachyons are a favorite of science fiction
writers.
Many Universes
Imagine James is in a park and Qued comes by. Qued says, Lets go down to the lake. I have something
amazing to show you. A breeze has covered the lake in sparking wind ripples. This is a nice set of ripples;
Ill freeze them. Now help me toss out the ping-pong balls in this bag. The label on the bag says Universal
Balls. No matter how many balls Qued throws out, the bag never gets empty. Qued points to the lake and

45
says, See how they end up mostly in the low spots of the ripples? Notice that not all low spots are the same
depth. Some of the ripples have little ripples on the side and sometimes a ping-pong ball rests there. A few
balls are near the top of a ripple in a little dip. Im tired of tossing ping-pong balls. He shakes the sack and
a flood of balls comes out. At the same time, the shore disappears and it is lake, ripples, and balls in all
directions as far as one can see. [Figureping pong universe and lake, drawing].
James, Dont touch any of the balls because now they are universes. All together, this is the multiverse. The
lake surface is the energy level of the vacuum. It is not a constant. A universe can have a range of vacuum
energies. String theory allows an enormous number of vacuums. Each state of the vacuum makes a different
kind of universe with different forces, strings, and physical constants. Each universe has a different
configuration of the curly dimensions.
The G in Newtons equation for gravity sets the strength of the gravitational field. In some of these
universes, G is 10,000 times bigger. With gravity so strong, all matter would collapse into a huge black hole.
In another universe, the speed of light is only 10 mph. Another universe might be a single giant star. Some
are cold and dark with matter smeared out evenly over the universe. Nearly all universes are too strange for
life to evolve. Some may have only two elementary particles, only three forces, or even six forces. A few
may support life weirder than we are. One is your universe.
James asks, Why cant we see these other universes?
They may be like a marshmallow in rocky road ice cream. The marshmallow is our eleven-dimensional
spacetime, a brane. The ice cream is also a brane, larger and having more dimensions. Other universes
would be other marshmallows, nuts, or chocolate. We see when photons come from an object and enter our
eye. Particles from one brane cannot reach or interact in any way with another brane. They cannot cross the
brane gap.
Another variation of the multiverse proposes that, new universes can pop up inside other universes. [Figure
soap bubble universes, photo] This is similar to elementary particles leaking through walls. A part of a
universe would slip into a different position, a different vacuum energy with different laws. With this model,
the multiverse would look like a foam of soap bubbles with soap bubbles inside the bubbles inside of
bubblesuniverses within universes.
Other physicists say this is too much like claiming that an invisible duck is stomping on your head. The duck
is angry, undetectable, weightless, invisible, not affected by any force, and silent and it is on your head in a
different brane. The duck idea is designed to prevent arguments. There is no way to prove the duck is not
there. There is no way to prove it is there. Scientists say the duck is not science but nonsense. The multiverse
idea does not have a way to prove it true or false, similar to the invisible duck. However, the idea does come
from a theory that may be the theory of everything. What do you think? Would you care if there were other
universes? Would you care if there were an invisible duck on your head?
There is much debate about the multiverse. Some physicists claim, that if the equations describe other
universes, then they must exist. There is that long history in physics that if something is not forbidden, then
it is allowed or even required. These universes would be separate from us by so much space and time, or by
some other impenetrable barrier, so that they are impossible to detect.
Does Thinking Affect Reality?
When we see something, there is an interaction between our body and the world. Our senses receive energy
from the world. We process the data from our senses, analyze, and identify what we see, hear, or feel. While
our mind does all this, reality does not change. In quantum mechanics, the act of observing subatomic
particles does change reality. All quantum properties are fuzzy. Before a measurement, a property has a
range of possible values. For example, electron spin is either spin up, +1/2, or spin down, -1/2. The wave
equation gives these two possibilities equal probability, fifty-fifty. There are still different opinions about
what this means. It does not mean the spin is the average, spin zero. Electrons cannot have spin zero. It
could mean the spin is not valid; the spin does not exist; the particle or spin does not exist until we do a
measurement; the spin is half up and half down; the spin in one universe is up and in another it is down.
With a measurement, the electron suddenly is either spin up or down 100%. Before the measurement, the
electron spin was vague. What happened? What caused the change? From the wide range of possible
explanations, you can conclude that physicists are still debating this question from ninety years ago. Many
suspect we are more than just a passive observer of reality. What do you think?

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One idea is that the electron follows all possibilities but in parallel universes. If a particle takes all
possibilities then every spin measurement generates a parallel universe. These universes are different from
the multiverse of string theory. They have the same hidden dimensions. Each of the universes has the same
laws of physics. With a spin measurement, we make two universes out of one. One has our electron with
spin up and one with spin down. Of course, that means we become two observers, one who just measured a
spin up and the other measured spin down. Because of all the observations made in everyday life, copies of
us would exist in practically an infinite number of universes.
Other physicists believe a particle does not have a location, spin, or velocity until we go to measure it. Our
measurement creates the reality of the electron and its spin. Some would say the particle does not even exist
until measured. All explanations of measurement of quantum properties and the collapse of the wave
function mix together mind and reality. Though most physicists try to side step the issue, there is a link
between the conscious choice to do a measurement, the equipment used, and the collapse of the wave
function to the result of the measurement. We do a measurement and suddenly the ill-defined position of an
electron becomes right there. In quantum pool, we could detect the pool balls as waves or as particles. They
were waves until we did a measurement of position by having the ball drop into a pocket. Some physicists
believe that consciousness itself has a link to a deeper reality that will help us make more sense of quantum
mechanics. It appears that our conscious will to measure a particles properties forces it in some unknown
way into a well-defined state. We and the universe are collections of elementary particles. If the universe has
these properties, then so do we.
Entanglement is another situation where measurement changes reality. If two electrons entangle by a simple
interaction and then separate, when we observe the state of one, then we also know the state of the other. It is
as if each seems instantly to know the state of the other. How? Physicists do not know. Entanglement
occurs between any two interacting objects. For example, we would entangle with any electron we measure.
We do not have a spin to flip, but our wave function, quantum description of what is knowable about us, is
affected in the future by that electron and we affect it. We entangle with not only with the electron but also
with everything else in the universe. Our entanglements are very weak, but not zero. As far as we know,
these entanglements have no measureable effect.
Those most attached to a link between physics and consciousness believe we are the eyes, ears, and brains of
the universe trying to understand itself. Through us, the universe examines, understands, evolves, and
creates a bigger self. We are one with the universe. Mystics feel and believe this and so do some physicists.
For the physicist, entanglement connects us to the universe and to each other. Science cannot prove
mysticism. You either see it or you do not.
There is a recent art movement, post-modernism, which stresses how much our point of view affects our
reality. Roughly, it is the idea that we create our own reality. Physics is saying a similar thing but in a limited
way. This is almost Buddhism. Buddhists emphasize the importance of thought. Some believe all is mind
that we exist as thoughts in a divine mind. Perhaps reality changes us. The reality change we see in quantum
mechanics is really just a change in our consciousness. Observations leave reality unchanged but change us.
The unanswered questions about quantum mechanics leave the door open to speculation, some of it by
esteemed physicists. Science narrows its point of view to what it can verify. Theories show how to calculate
the results of measurements. Measurements can be repeated and results are very accurate. It appears that the
universe is an interconnected whole and that changes are caused by us. Quantum effects are strong for sub-
atomic particles, but they exist for even large particles like us. What do you think? Does an electron
somehow know we are measuring so it shapes up as either spin up or spin down? Why? Are we connected
in a meaningful way to the entire universe and do we cause different realities to happen?
Another explanation of quantum mechanics is that it is only an approximation to a better theory. This better
theory would use hidden variables that are guiding quantum events. We just are not skillful enough now to
detect these hidden variables. Carefully repeated physics experiments with polarized light prove that either
everything is interconnected or that observation creates reality. It is amazing that work in a physics lab can
say precise things about mysticism and philosophy.
Intelligent Design
String theory has stirred up the debate about intelligent design. String theory allows many different
universes. These universes can be very different from ours. Evolution of life requires a very small range of
values for some of the physical universes physics constants, the nineteen numbers of quantum mechanics.

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In string theory, the shape of the curly hidden dimensions sets the values of the constants. Very few
universes can support life. Conditions are too hard for life to evolve there. Some think this means our
universe was specially designed for life, for us. Most scientists change it around. This universe works for us
because if it did not, we would not be here. Since we are here, the universe has to be one that supports life
no matter how rare such universes are. This is confusing, but they are two distinct points of view. Either we
are here because the universe is designed for life, or the universe can support life, therefore we are here.
Most scientists would not use intelligent design as an explanation. It is like the invisible duck. You cannot
prove intelligent design is true, and you cannot prove it is false. If you accept intelligent design, it could
mean you stop looking for a scientific explanation. Therefore, you will not find a scientific explanation. A
century ago, no one had a good explanation of why electrons did not fall into a nucleus. One possibility is
that the atom was intelligently designed that way. If that was a satisfactory explanation, then we may not
have discovered quantum mechanics and all the marvelous advances it brought to the 20th century. Other
examples are the biological sciences, DNA, evolution, and gene therapy. Some believers in intelligent design
think it is wrong to mess with what has been divinely designed. They will not discover the beautiful
complexity of life or understand how life evolved into the wonderful diversity around us. They will not
discover the causes and cures of genetic diseases.
One side says that since the world is complicated, and yet fits together so well, someone had to design it that
way. The other side says yes, the world is complicated. That is how the world is, and yet, this complicated
world follows from a few simple rules. Great complexity can come from simple rules. Intelligent design
would replace large blocks of research, theory, and experiment. Intelligent design makes no predictions and
there is no way to prove it false. What do you think?
In debates between fundamentalists and scientist, you often hear the remark that we dont have to believe
that, its only a theory. Scientists are guilty of using the word theory in a number of ways, covering many
levels of uncertainty. Scientists do not use a special word for theories like evolution that they have verified
millions of times. These theories are true and only likely to change by expanding over more data and in
adjusting small details. Scientists need a word for these well-proven theories.
Scientists, however, always keep an open mind, at least open a crack. For example, we might discover crews
from flying saucers digging holes and burying bones from their planet, creating our fossils. Either look out
for saucers or accept that evolution is a fact. Other true theories are mechanics, nuclear explosives,
hydrodynamics, and electromagnetism. [FigureAliens burying bones, drawing] For these areas, theory
means the highest level of scientific confidence. It means a group of related ideas explaining something in
nature supported by lots of observations, data, verified predictions, and connections to other verified
theories. What would you do if a well-verified theory of science contradicted one of your beliefs?
Goofer says, Qued, when scientists speculate they get really wild and hard to understand.
You are certainly correct. It is not important to remember the various arguments but just to know that
physicists do more than experiments, solving equations, or building machines, says Qued. They are trying
to understand the most basic things about the world. There are many exciting problems that the next
generation of scientists will pursue.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. A. Einstein
Tying Up Loose Strings
The accomplishments of physics and the other sciences are very impressive. Science is involved in every
manufactured item and affects everything in our lives. In the future, it will affect even more. Can science or
the scientific method apply to everything? No, there are large parts of experience like emotions, art, music,
and faith that do not fit the scientific model. There are many other areas where the scientific method could
apply such as politics, advertising, psychology, and education.
The greatest accomplishment of science will be the theory of everything. String theory is not yet there.
String theory succeeds in ending the 100-year physics problem, the separation of relativity and quantum
mechanics. It does this very elegantly. Right now string theory provides a framework that could become the
theory of everything. It can explain the elementary particles and forces, the three families of strings, the
strengths of the forces. It has not done most of this because the shape of the hidden dimensions is unknown.
It is most amazing, that string theory with mathematics, a few laws, and a small bunch of equations, may
explain everything. A great deal of theory and experiment is necessary to establish if string theory can do it.

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This is an exciting time to consider a career in science. You could become a part of the oldest and most
successful effort to understand our world.
Everything and every force is the result of vibrations of strings. Strings vibrate in more than the four
dimensions of spacetime. There are also seven tightly curled up dimensions. We may never be able to see
these dimensions, unlike the four dimensions of spacetime. The shape of these dimensions sets the properties
of the forces and particles. It also determines the laws of physics of the universe. String theory allows
multiple universes.
Particles and forces are bound to branes, higher dimensional objects. The only exception is gravitys
graviton that moves between branes. Multiple universes can be very close but in different branes and not be
detectable except by extremely weak gravitational effects.
Back to our very first question, do strings hold the world together? Most physicists would say yes. String
theory does have problems, but it is still under construction. A theory of everything is a gigantic challenge.
String theory makes many predictions. We just cannot accelerate particles to high enough energy to check
them. Most important is that string theory pulls together all of physics into a beautiful consistent whole.
String explains many things we know, like black holes, quantum gravity, elementary particles, quantum
mechanics, relativity, the unification of forces, and the structure of the universe. It also requires things we
may never be able to prove, like the seven extra dimensions and unlimited choices of universes. It is a theory
of everything but it is just being discovered. That leaves lots of room for heated debate.
Is there a multiverse? Most physicists would say probably not. The big hope is that we will find an arrow
saying this is our universe and the shape of our curly dimensions.
If string holds the universe together, then everything, energy, forces, and matter, is made from string. Strings
vibrating in different spaces, at different frequencies, and interacting cause all the amazing things in our
universe. Strings are always vibrating. The whole universe is always singing. You are part of the universe.
You also are singing, in every little bit of you. Take time to listen to the music, the music of the spheres. It is
the music between your ears.

This is the Sri Yantra.

It is optical art made in India thousands of years ago.
If you stare steadily at the center for five minutes,
You will have an interesting experience.
The lines may change into strings whose dancing makes music.
The music of the spheres.

THE END
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