Greate quote: Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.

October 26, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR; The Universe on a String: "
String theory continues to offer profound breadth and enormous potential to explain matter’s fundamental constituents…."

Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, is the author of “The Elegant Universe” and “The Fabric of the Cosmos.”

String theory offers a new perspective on matter’s fundamental constituents. Once viewed as point-like dots of virtually no size, particles in string theory are minuscule, vibrating, string-like filaments. And much as different vibrations of a violin string produce different musical notes, different vibrations of the theory’s strings produce different kinds of particles. An electron is a tiny string vibrating in one pattern, a quark is a string vibrating in a different pattern. Particles like the photon that convey nature’s forces in the quantum realm are strings vibrating in yet other patterns.

There are, however, features of the theory that may be open to examination even with our incomplete understanding. We may be able to test the theory’s predictions of particular new particle species, of dimensions of space beyond the three we can directly see, and even its prediction that microscopic black holes may be produced through highly energetic particle collisions. Without the exact equations, our ability to describe these attributes with precision is limited, but the theory gives enough direction for the Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic particle accelerator now being built in Geneva and scheduled to begin full operation in 2008, to search for supporting evidence by the end of the decade.

String theory continues to offer profound breadth and enormous potential. It has the capacity to complete the Einsteinian revolution and could very well be the concluding chapter in our species’ age-old quest to understand the deepest workings of the cosmos.

Will we ever reach that goal? I don’t know. But that’s both the wonder and the angst of a life in science. Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.

(Via NYT > Contributors.)

 

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