Documentary Description
"String's the Thing," opens with a whimsical scene in a movie theater
in which the history of the universe runs backwards to the Big Bang,
the moment at which general relativity and quantum mechanics both came
into play, and therefore the point at which our conventional model of
reality breaks down.
Then it's string theory to the rescue as Greene describes the steps
that led from a forgotten 200-year-old mathematical formula to the first
glimmerings of strings—quivering strands of energy whose different
vibrations give rise to quarks, electrons, photons, and all other
elementary particles. Strings are truly tiny, being smaller than an atom
by the same factor that a tree is smaller than the solar system. But,
as Greene explains, they are able to combine the laws of the large and
the laws of the small into a proposal for a single, harmonious theory of
everything.
But even with its many theoretical successes, as of the 1990s
physicists realized that strings suffered from a pernicious flaw—an
embarrassment of riches: There were five different versions of the
theory, each totally out of sync with the others. We have one universe,
so shouldn't there be one theory of everything?
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