String Theory

[flippineck]

It says no heated discussion of religion / politics so excercise restraint, but, please discuss string theory. Little tiny wigglers that are the basic building blocks of everything. Fascinating. But, is it possible to discuss without bringing in the maths?

 

[GreenGiant]

Without including the math you've basically summed up string theory.

Nah just kidding, the whole idea is interesting, and there is math out there that does show some shadow of proof that it is a real thing (I for one believe that string theory holds some truth if it is not completely correct).

I'm not sure if there are any theoretical physicists on this site, but I would be interested in tossing around ideas about it, and discussing string theory. Did you have something in mind that you wanted to know?

 

[flippineck]

Well it kinda intrigues me as to what these strings are made of

I keep coming back to thinking of an electromagnetic wave travelling in a vacuum. There's no actual substrate there, but the wave still exists, it uses the magnetic and electric fields to propagate right?

So.. what is the invisible 'goop' that constitutes those fields.. & is that same 'goop' the stuff that strings are made of?

There's one particularly intriguing facet that describes how matter can spontaneously come into existence from nothing, ISTR Stephen Hawking had something to do with it

Just find the whole subject fascinating because it seems to indicate that if you go down deep enough, you come to a point where existence sprouts directly from nonexistence via some kind of mathematical machinery. We aren't really here, it's all just a big maths conjuring trick. Scary weird.

 

[GreenGiant]

I believe that the strings in question are more fundamental than an electromagnetic wave in a vacuum, in fact an electromagnetic wave would be made of electrons, photons and gravitons, which are theoretically made of strings oscillating in different ways.

My understanding is that the strings move fast enough that we perceive them as particles (similar to how we perceive plane propellers as discs rather than individual blades when they are spinning) and depending on the way that they are oscillating determines what type of particle we see them as. I believe that the strings themselves are made out of pure energy.

 

[flippineck]

So this begs the question, what exactly is energy itself? and the really queer part to me is, this bit about how it can spontaneously come into existence from nothing.. I'll have to go & google the process but it's somewhat related to something called 'hawking radiation' I seem to recall. Apparently there are 'jets' hanging around in space which spew out this newly created matter / energy, it doesn't come pre-existing from a weird 'other dimension' or anything like that, it just appears fresh from nowhere. and yes then it does it's vibrating business and manifests as the subatomic particles etc. ISTR there was some kind of an involvement of up to 11 dimensions but not as a hidden source of this fresh matter / energy, some kind of n-dimensional interplay actually creates something out of nothing!

Wish I could recall the name of the TV documentary I saw all this on. It was on a UK non subscription channel 2 or 3 years back.