String Theory in Two Minutes

An anonymous reader writes "Most of us have heard of string theory, many of us know what it is and some of us may even be experts in the field. But could you explain it in two minutes? Discover Magazine recently had a contest to do precisely that: create a two minute or less video of everything you need to know about string theory. You can view some of the best entries (video) as well as the winning video: String Ducky!"

Comments

first explain it to physicists...

[presarioD]

...I'm a physicist and frankly I don't see the reason why should somebody waste time explaining a theory to the vast public that hasn't been proved right for over than 30 years now. It's quite beautiful (from the seminars I have attended) but... not verified by experiement...so... let's create some hype for the masses to consume and maybe publish a book or two and some opeds with the NYT!

Scientific value vs. politics = 0 - 1 this morning...

Re:A modern day fairy tale

[wizardforce]

Cosmological theories are currently not much better than intelligent design - you just have to take them on faith.

except string theory is based on some very complicated math and heavily encrusted in physics, intelligent design on the other hand is an attempt to justify the writings of biblical authors over 2,000 years ago there is a clear difference.

Different versions of the string theory can not even agree on the number of physical dimensions that exists. They are basically just playing with numbers to try to match the observed strength of gravity.

after you do the math it works out that if you don't have supersymmetry you need precisely 26 dimensions to fit what we observe, with supersymmetry you only need 10 or 11, the 11th unique to M-theory seems to explain phenomenae predicted by the 5 major string theories common a few years ago. it does make predictions although at the moment the number that we can test are very small, this will change as we get better at observing higher energy events and work out more of the math.

Not to mention that our existing physics only explains 10% of gravity in the universe. Talk all you want about dark matter, but this leaves the possibility of pretty dramatic flaws in our current theories.

except that we have observed objects in the universe that seem to have wrenched dark matter out into the open, free of most of the visible matter. we still see the gravitational lensing effect of this matter which allows us in effect to map dark matter in that region.

The biggest flaw in current cosmology is why we are not trapped in a singularity of a universe-mass black hole. Certainly for long time after big bang the universe was inside its own Schwarzschild Radius. Why didn't it just collapse right back after the big bang? After all, it would take an infinite force to escape the event horizon. Oh right, something caused "space" to mysteriously expand, just like now some unspecified dark matter keeps stuff from expanding. It sounds like we need more work to get to the standard of scientific theories.

space is in fact expanding, not only that but the expansion is accellerating over time. space isn't theoretically expanding, it litterally is expanding at great velocity. although at the same time, there is growing evidence that certain higher dimensional phenomenae could be responsible for this expansion and even the kind that caused the big bang [if causality even means anything at that point] but there is a very important thing to learn here, there is never ever an infinite force, there is a limit to the magnitude of a force, gravity is likely to be quantised as well, which probably means that there is a finite limit to spatial curvature. the concept of an infinitely dense mass may also not even exist if there is a finite quantised limit to spatial curvature. we have a few years or less before we can start really testing some of the predictions of quantum gravity and string theory in general, if we're wrong, we learned from it and can better understand the universe because of it.