A Quote by Antony Garrett Lisi
There are a lot of good things about string theory, and it's great that some people want to work on it.
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The best theory comes from string theory, which states that dark matter is nothing but a higher vibration of the string. We are, in some sense, the lowest octave of a vibrating string.
The beauty of string theory is the metaphor kind of really comes very close to the reality. The strings of string theory are vibrating the particles, vibrating the forces of nature into existence, those vibrations are sort of like musical notes. So string theory, if it's correct, would be playing out the score of the universe.
I hope we find evidence of dark matter in the lab and in outer space. This would go a long way to proving the correctness of string theory, which is what I do for a living. That is my day job. So string theory is a potentially experimentally verifiable theory.
I had two passions when I was a child. First was to learn about Einstein's theory and help to complete his dream of a unified theory of everything. That's my day job. I work in something called string theory. I'm one of the founders of the subject. We hope to complete Einstein's dream of a theory of everything.
Grab a guitar, put some kind of strings on it, a banjo string, then a violin string, then a guitar string, tune it any way you want, and make some noise, and see what you get. And work on it until you get something that you think is interesting. That's all there is to art for me.
One very important aspect of string theory is definitely testable. That was the prediction of supersymmetry, which emerged from string theory in the early '70s.
I think there are some things in music that work and don't work. That's learned from counterpoint and rhythm and theory, and they don't work if you don't want them to work.
In order to achieve a true understanding of string theory, some new idea will be required, and most likely, some break with the concepts on which we've traditionally based physical theory.
Some string theorists prefer to believe that string theory is too arcane to be understood by human beings, rather than consider the possibility that it might just be wrong.
As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.
Everybody knows about Las Vegas. It's a state of mind. Some people want to come with their kids and have a great weekend. Some people want to shop. Some people want to find hookers. Some people want to eat. Some people just want to gamble. It's a potpourri of decadence.
One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.
In life, people tend to wait for good things to come to them. And by waiting, they miss out. Usually, what you wish for doesn't fall in your lap; it falls somewhere nearby, and you have to recognize it, stand up, and put in the time and work it takes to get to it. This isn't because the universe is cruel. It's because the universe is smart. It has its own cat-string theory and knows we don't appreciate things that fall into our laps.
String theory's biggest prediction is that gravity exists. That's good. That's a lot more than preceding theories could do.
Scientists are educated from a very early time and a very early age to believe that the greater scientist is the scientist who makes discoveries or theories that apply to the greatest ambit of things in the world. And if you've only made a very good theory about snails, or a very good theory about some planets but not about the universe as a whole, or about all the history of humankind, then you have in some sense accepted a lower position in the hierarchy of the fame of science as it's taught to you as a young student.
Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles.
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