Elegant Universe Airs Tonight on PBS

fatarfy writes "USA Today among others has an article discussing tonight's presentation of Brian Greene's Elegant Universe, which discusses String Theory. It airs on PBS. From the article: 'The two segments of the show turn their spotlights on a crisis in physics, one invisible to the general public but increasingly embarrassing to the discipline. Simply put, Einstein's unbelievably accurate explanation of gravity, known as general relativity, is completely out of whack with the equally accurate explanation of electromagnetism, radioactivity and atomic forces known as quantum mechanics. The theories are mankind's most fundamental views of verifiable reality, and the disagreement means that something important about the universe eludes our understanding.' Sounds like it's worth watching."

Comments

Re:String Theory

[citoc]

The issue isn't the inability to understand higher dimensions, most critics have an issue with the inability to observe higher dimensions. If higher dimensions exist, why don't we observe things moving in them? The only reason String theory predicts higher dimensions is because the matrix it uses (the math kind not the movie kind ;-) can only be solved in higher dimensions. So the explanation that these higher dimensions must in fact exist on a plane smaller than our observable limit (roughly a proton) seems a bit arbitrary to some (many).

Surely we can agree that the gap between quantum and relativity needs to be filled, but going off on a whole set of random assumptions based on what needs to be true to solve a little math issue might not be the best approach. Then again, look what it did for Einstein... Of course the difference there was that his predictions were actually observed...