If You Think a 4th Dimension is Crazy Look at This.

I was reading through a PM magazine a month or two ago, and it had a small article on the string theory. Well, in this theory, there are 11 dimensions and instead of particles, strings.

Now, if I began to try to explain on my own, you would be more confused than anything. So I'll use this explaination from a web site:

"Think of a guitar string that has been tuned by stretching the string under tension across the guitar. Depending on how the string is plucked and how much tension is in the string, different musical notes will be created by the string. These musical notes could be said to be excitation modes of that guitar string under tension.
In a similar manner, in string theory, the elementary particles we observe in particle accelerators could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation modes of elementary strings.
In string theory, as in guitar playing, the string must be stretched under tension in order to become excited. However, the strings in string theory are floating in spacetime, they aren't tied down to a guitar. Nonetheless, they have tension. The string tension in string theory is denoted by the quantity 1/(2 p a'), where a' is pronounced "alpha prime"and is equal to the square of the string length scale.
If string theory is to be a theory of quantum gravity, then the average size of a string should be somewhere near the length scale of quantum gravity, called the Planck length, which is about 10-33 centimeters, or about a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter. Unfortunately, this means that strings are way too small to see by current or expected particle physics technology (or financing!!) and so string theorists must devise more clever methods to test the theory than just looking for little strings in particle experiments...."

There was more to it, but you can look at it if you click the link above.

So are you confused yet?

Well, as some of you are going on about the 4th dimension, I have been looking through some of the string theory. ...and one thing I have learned is that gravity is one of the dimentions brought up.

...so we have a point, x, y, z, time, gravity...

[Edit]I forgot to give you this link that will let you venture into this subject if you wish. superstringtheory.com...[/Edit]


[Edited on 10-28-2003 by Cammo Dude]

Yeah its all interesting.. I had posted about The String Theory on Nova tonight. It shows great promise as a unified theory over all forces

Originally posted by MrRadicalEd
Yeah its all interesting.. I had posted about The String Theory on Nova tonight. It shows great promise as a unified theory over all forces

If we could truly understand how this all works if it really is true, we could control many factors of life. We would have endless oportunities come from something like this.

PBS's website for the nova program (here: www.pbs.org... ) has some really neat stuff to go along with the program, and helps explain the string theory for complete physics neophytes like myself.

" I made your link work"

[Edited on 28-10-2003 by All Seeing Eye]

Originally posted by MorningtonCrescent
PBS's website for the nova program (here: www.pbs.org... ) has some really neat stuff to go along with the program, and helps explain the string theory for complete physics neophytes like myself.

" I made your link work"

[Edited on 28-10-2003 by All Seeing Eye]

I don't have PBS so I had someone record it for me. I had been looking forward to watching it.