String Theory Notes (Part 2)

• Shortest distance between 1 points – straight line
• Albert Einstein said space could bend and create wormholes
• Space bend, distance between 2 points decrease
• Einstein says space can’t rip
• Wormhole doesn’t exist because of that face
• Strings calm chaotic world of atoms
• World of atoms rip, strings put protective shield over rip
• So space can actually rip
5 different string theories competing
• Ed Witman solved this problem
o Provided different view of string theory
• 5 different theories turned out to be 5 different ways of looking at string theory
• Called M Theory
• 10 dimensions (normal), 11 dimensions (M theory)
• 1 Time Dimension
• 3 Space Dimensions
• 6 Tiny dimensions
• Other dimensions
o  think movie – 2-D
o characters look like they can move, but really, they are stuck in a frame
• String can stretch 11 dimensions
• String called membrane (or brane)
• Can stretch as big as universe
• We can live inside a larger, bigger dimension
o Like living in a loaf of bread
• Gravity very weak electromagnetism 1000 billion billion billion billion billion times stronger than gravity
• Possible that gravity is just as strong as electromagnetism, but we can’t see it
• Strings may be open-ended – end tied down to earth
• Graviton strings tied together, leave our membrane
• We believe big bang was a bang out of nothing, not a little dot
• Could be caused by 2 parallel branes colliding with each other
• When membranes collided, there was debris
• May see signs of strings on other stars
• Two labs tried proving string theory by colliding two atoms together without their electrons
• Fermilab and CERN
Bonus: I would send Ptolemy because he was probably the first scientist who tried to understand the universe.