String Theory Presentation 2

I'm gonna open this with an analogy from Michio Kaku.

2000 years ago there were a group of Greek philosophers called the Pythagorean. They worked out the laws of harmony on a violin string. They realised if you take a violin string and you take the resonance of it, The resonances corresponded to integers. And they were marvelled that music could be explained in terms of vibrating strings. They then said that perhaps the universe could be explained by the laws of harmony.

To understand string theory. We have to look at what makes up an atom.

Well if you look inside the atom there are electrons whizzing around the nucleus. The nucleus is made out of protons and neutrons. We think protons are made out of quarks. But is that the end, are quarks the fundamental. Well, they make us 6 of the now 17 things in the standard model of elementary particles. Up Quarks, Charm Quarks, Top Quarks, Down Quarks, Strange Quarks and Bottom Quarks. Then in the standard model there are the leptons. The electron, the muon, the tau, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. Then there are the Gauge bosons. The photon, the gluon, the Z boson and the W boson. Then off on its own there is the recently added Higgs Boson. But can you go deeper. Can you break down this zoo of elementary particles even further?

String theory states that if you could look at the quarks, you would realise they are little loops, vibrating at a certain mode. And that if you changed the way they vibrate, you could change things between these elementary particles. A single form of matter, that based on the rate it vibrates at could determine every elementary particle include or not include in the current standard model of elementary particles. This is the string.

This theory has a defect, which almost killed the theory. In the early 70s it was worked out order for string theory to occur, there would need to be 10 dimensions.

In the universe as we perceive it on our day to day lives.  There are 4 Dimensions. 3 Spacial, 1 Temporal. Forward, Left, Up, And the passage of time. We can visualise these, we are used to them. So. Hidden dimensions, that we cannot interact with, this is what string theory states is the case. In fact there must be 26 spacetime dimensions for the bosonic string, and 10 for the superstring. Notice I say spacetime dimensions, and not spacial and temporal dimensions. String theory treats those as the same thing.

And that is why string theory is a controversial topic.

String theory can be defined by a series of very formula, much like the standard model and loop quantum gravity.

And when these equations are solved, either you will find our universe as a solution, and every other universe in the multi-verse of hypothetical dimensions within string theory. Or, you will find nothing. It will be false. And this uncertainty is why there is much controversy over string theory, and its place in science.