Can you explain the String theory for me?

Question

I looked it up but I don't understand it.

Answer 1

The string theory has emerged as the most promising candidate for a microscopic theory of gravity. And it is infinitely more ambitious than that: it attempts to provide a complete, unified, and consistent description of the fundamental structure of our universe. (For this reason it is sometimes, quite arrogantly, called a 'Theory of Everything').

The essential idea behind string theory is this: all of the different 'fundamental ' particles of the Standard Model are really just different manifestations of one basic object: a string. How can that be? Well, we would ordinarily picture an electron, for instance, as a point with no internal structure. A point cannot do anything but move. But, if string theory is correct, then under an extremely powerful 'microscope' we would realize that the electron is not really a point, but a tiny loop of string. A string can do something aside from moving--- it can oscillate in different ways. If it oscillates a certain way, then from a distance, unable to tell it is really a string, we see an electron. But if it oscillates some other way, well, then we call it a photon, or a quark, or a ... you get the idea. So, if string theory is correct, the entire world is made of strings!

Answer 2

Don't expect to understand it from a few words posted here or the summaries in Wikipedia and elsewhere. Brian Greene's book does a fair job of giving you a feeling for what it's about. The PBS show based on that book does a poor job. Zwiebach is the first comprehensive text I've seen, but it's 578 pages and obviously requires a really strong mathematical background to understand.

To avoid disappointment, realize from the start that there is not yet a complete string theory, and we don't know for sure that there ever will be one which successfully explains physics.

Answer 3

String theory at this time is nothing more than an unbelievably complex set of mathematical equations that attempts to unify gravity with the other three fundamental forces of nature (..electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force..). One of the implications of string theory is that all elementary particles, like the electron, proton, quarks, etc.,. are made out of infinitesimally tiny 'strings.' The frequency of any particular string determines what the particle will be.

Answer 4

It goes thus: matter contains strands of vibrating strings of energy, they live on a 1 dimensional brane and can be anything from the size of a quark or electron to the size of a universe - could we be living on a brane - personally I don't care although it's intriguing - too much for me to take in. The way the strings move (in 11 dimensions - e.g. curls - like a bug on a wire, curves and diagonal dimensions) defines what type of sub-atomic particle or thing it will be.

Answer 5

String theory is a model of fundamental physics whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects called strings, rather than the zero-dimensional point particles that form the basis for the Standard Model of particle physics. The phrase is often used as shorthand for Superstring theory, as well as related theories such as M-theory. String theorists are attempting to adjust the Standard Model by removing the assumption in quantum mechanics that particles are point-like. By removing this assumption and replacing the point-like particles with strings, it appears that a sensible quantum theory of gravity naturally emerges. Moreover, string theory may be able to "unify" the known natural forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear) by describing them with the same set of equations.

Very few avenues for experimental verification of the theory have been claimed.[1] With the construction of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN some scientists hope to produce relevant data. However, it is likely that any theory of quantum gravity would require much higher energies to probe.

There are different versions of string theory, depending on factors such as whether or not supersymmetry is incorporated into the formulation. These versions are thought to be related to each other as different limits of one theory, coined M-theory. However, there is a huge number of possible solutions to string theory as it is currently understood.[2] Thus it has been claimed by some scientists that string theory may not be falsifiable and may have no predictive power.[3][4][5][6]

Studies of string theory have revealed that it predicts higher-dimensional objects called branes. String theory strongly suggests the existence of ten or eleven (in M-theory[7]) spacetime dimensions, as opposed to the usual four (three spatial and one temporal) used in relativity theory; however the theory can describe universes with four effective (observable) spacetime dimensions by a variety of methods.

An important branch of the field is dealing with a conjectured duality between string theory as a theory of gravity and gauge theory. It is hoped that research in this direction will lead to new insights on quantum chromodynamics, the fundemental theory of strong nuclear force. This direction of research has better hopes to make contact with experiment, compared to string theory as a quantum theory of gravity,[8][9][10] though currently the alternative, Lattice QCD, is doing a much better job and has already made contact with experiments at various fields with good results [11], though the computations are numerical rather than analytic.

Answer 6

wow, good question!!! Although I have heard of the string theory I cant remember how it goes....

I website I normally go for answering my questions is

madsci.com

I only just discovered the website but its a good reference site :)

another one is wikipedia.com

BTW my major is Human Biology (pre-med) - molecular genetics is just one of the units we have to study....yeah, its definately interesting...and very much in depth