Humans looked into the stars at the beginning of time, and their mystery has baffled us
ever since. It was once thought that mankind would never be able to comprehend or even begin
to grasp the laws that govern our existence, yet we were able to prove ourselves wrong with
time, and through the minds of great physicist and scientists. In the same way, we will someday
be able to, but with the vastness and apparent unruly nature of space how would going beyond
the understanding of our galactic neighborhood even be possible, even more so manage, to
understand the laws that govern everything through a single equation. Physics has presented a
solution, an idea most commonly known as the String Theory, a theory that may within itself
hold the basis to achieve that which every physicist, even Einstein, most longs for, The Theory
of Everything.
Our journey begins in 1968 with physicist Gabriele Veneziano who found within one of
Leonhard Euler’s equation the explanation for Strong Nuclear Force, one of the fundamental
forces in physics. No one would have known it at that moment, but Veneziano had stumbled
upon something much greater. Euler’s equation eventually found its way to American physicist
Leonard Susskind who investigated it further because in it he saw the possibility for the
explanation of much more than the Strong Force. With time he started to realize that said
formula represented some kind of particles that had internal structure and could vibrate, an
innovative theory compared to its other more common interpretation of point particles. He began
to understand this as a string connecting two points, much like a strand of energy, which could
not only stretch and contract, but could also oscillate. Considered too radical at his time, the idea
was dismissed and mainstream science continued to see particles as points, not strings.
Physicist continued to explore the behavior of microscopic particles by smashing them
together at high speeds and studying those collisions, experiments through which they soon
learned that there were far more particles that they had originally believed. This discovery lead to
new theories, the most popular of these being the Standard Model, a theory that consisted on the
existence of messenger particles which are to be exchanged between objects thus creating the
effect of a force. The theory however popular only managed to explain three of the fundamental
forces in physics -Strong Nuclear Force, Weak Nuclear Force, and Electro Magnetism- failing to
encompass the most familiar, Gravity. Overshadowed by the Standard Model, String Theory was
cast aside although some physicist persisted on this idea even though the deeper into it they went
the more issues surfaced. The most significant of these issues being: 1) it predicted a particle,
later named tachyon, that is considered unphysical due to that it is supposed to travel faster than
light, 2) there was a discovery that the theory required 10 dimensions, which at the time, even
theoretically, were considered more than there are, and 3) it had a massless particle which was
not seen in experiment. These predictions sounded preposterous to the science community and
therefore the theory was regarded as incorrect.
By 1973 only a few physicist, one of which was John Schwarz, were still working on
String Theory. Schwarz wrestled to solve String Theory’s numerous problems, among these the
prediction of a mysterious massless particle which had never been seen in nature, as well as
several mathematical inconsistencies. For multiple years Schwarz made variations to the formula
in an attempt to make it work, but all seemed lost until he started to consider that perhaps his
equations were describing gravity. However, to make sense of this new idea he would have to
reconsider the size of these strands of energy. Through this new line of thinking the mysterious
particle Schwarz had been trying to eliminate, now appeared to represent a graviton, a theorized
particle that had been long searched for due to that it is believed to transmit gravity at a quantum
level. With this new discovery String Theory now provided solutions that its competing theory,
the Standard Model, lacked. Still, the scientific community had no reaction regarding his
discovery. However scarce his victory Schwarz believed more than ever that these theorized
strings held the key to the unification of the four fundamental forces in physics -Strong Nuclear
Energy, Weak Nuclear Energy, Electro Magnetism, and Gravity-.
Schwarz was later joined in his quest by scientist Michael Green, who shared his belief in
the theory, although, in the early 1980’s String Theory still had fatal flaws due to mathematical
anomalies. After five years of dealing with the task of solving these flaws, in 1984 Schwarz and
Green finally managed to free the theory of these anomalies thus proving that it had the
mathematical depth to encompass all four forces. As Einstein once dreamed, their latest
discovery made it so that the unification of these forces into a single equation, a Theory of
Everything, was now possible. No other theory at the time had managed such an achievement,
for which reason it became widely popular, its impact in the scientific community was such that
in less than a year the number of String Theorists multiplied by the hundreds. The new version of
the String Theory seemed capable of describing all the building blocks of nature.
The theory states that Quarks, the particles that make up everything in the universe, are
made of even smaller parts, infinitely more diminutive oscillating strands of energy that look like
strings. The key idea is that just as different vibrational patterns or frequencies of a single cello
string create what we hear as different musical notes, the different waves at which the strings
vibrate give the particles their unique properties, such as mass and charge. The new idea resolves
the conflict between the views of space brought forward by Quantum Mechanics and General
Relativity, as it virtually calms the activity in quantum mechanics to the point where it can be
more easily stitched to General Relativity. String Theorists believe to be fulfilling Einstein’s
dream of uniting all forces and all matter, but this theory contains an aspect that has avoided it
from achieving everyone’s acceptance. This aspect is that no experiment could ever prove or
disprove the theory due to the scales that are being studied. Making string theory even harder to
prove is the fact that in order for it to work, the complex equations require extra dimensions of
space. In fact, the mathematics of String Theory demand the existence of 10 dimensions, among
these the ones we all know of movement on vertical, horizontal, and diagonal planes, as well as
time.
Many physicists are still working on String Theory and its ever growing field of possible
applications. Among these applications it is found that the theorized wormhole, a shortcut
through space and time, might actually be possible. Going back to String Theory itself, the issue
of the extra dimensions has been tried to be explained mathematically with some success, while
in our physical world it is stated that these extra dimensions might just be beyond our perception.
String Theory, along with the possibility of unifying all the fundamental forces in physics
within a Theory of Everything, as well as the idea of the existence of more than four dimensions,
to me is mind-blowing. For said reason have I read articles, and looked up other types of media,
about these works on my spare time, finding physics ever more interesting in the process.
References
Kaku, Michio (1999). Introduction to Superstring and M-Theory (2nd ed.). New York, USA:
Springer-Verlag.
Greene, Brian (2000). The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest
for the Ultimate Theory. Random House Inc.
"A Timeline of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics." A Timeline of Mathematics and
Theoretical Physics. Web. 5 Apr. 2015.
/history3.html>.
"The History of the String Theory." Timetoast. Web. 5 Apr. 2015.
timetoast.com/timelines/the-history-of-the-string-theory>.
Wray, Kevin. "An Introduction to String Theory." (2011). Ebook.
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