outer space life: January 2006 Archives

The following is the second in a series of essays about the pragmatism of modern physics. It may be the last, because I am tripping out super-hard about this stuff and kind of want to start thinking about the ocean again. Did you see that scientists just discovered the world's smallest fish?

Anyways, there has been quite a debate recently about String Theory. According to many, the assumptions upon which it is founded are unreliable. I couldn't even tell you what the exact conversation is, but it has something to do with the "alternate universe" aspects of the theory, and how the vast differences between these trouble our hopes for an underpinning and constant "Theory of Everything." Dr. Leonard Susskin, who first postulated the damned thing, is now modifying it in radical ways in order to re-align the existing ideas with this new criticism. He agrees that the Universe's total constancy is a misconception, but posits that this is a fortunate discovery, that we inhabit one of a "landscape" of different universes.

In a really good interview with The New Scientist, Susskin observed: "The great hope was that some deep mathematical principle would determine all the constants of nature, like Newton's constant. But it seems increasingly likely that the constants of nature...vary from place to place....many of the constants have to be just so if intelligent life is to exist. So we live where life is possible. For some physicists this idea is an incredible disappointment. Personally, I don't see it that way. I find it exciting to think that the universe may be much bigger, richer and full of variety than we ever expected. And it doesn't seem so incredibly philosophically radical to think that some things may be environmental."

Which is a very cool thing to say, incidentally.

So why is it that this relatively recent advance in physics remains invisible and undiscussed in popular media, particularly now that it has come into question? I mean: it's definitely a long-shot whack-job theory which only elucidates how abstract physics has become since Newton-times. On that token, however, Intelligent Design should be just as obscure, and yet I can't open a newspaper without seeing the painfully measured pseudo-science which proponents of ID insist on blathering upon the American public. The arguments which comprise String Theory are far more, well, intelligent -- not to mention agreed-upon by the scientific community, for the most part.

Moreover, the idea of living in a hypothetical landscape of multidimensional universes is something which should shatter our conceptions and force us -- in a leap of faith similar to believing in divine creation -- to restructure our place in the world. While the lay public -- myself included -- is still tripping out about the concept of atoms, or even of planets, physicists are rationally inhabiting a way, way, way cooler multiverse and they are not sharing it with us.

Scientists aren't to blame, however; after all, they aren't supposed to be missionaries. The problem, it seems to me, is that unlike most other major topics of media discussion -- art, politics, Paris Hilton's television career -- the sciences in general, and modern theoretical physics in particular, do not have very many pundits. Nor, to that matter, any middlemen between those doing the research and those ultimately affected by it, the world's populace. We don't need physicists and researchers to spread their gospel to us. That would put their hallowed objectivity into question. But we do need somebody else to keep us abreast on whatever the hell it is they are postulating about the Universe these days, because, I, for one, am not opposed to being part of a cool, ultradimensional multiverse: I just want someone to tell me about it.

The following blather is the first part in a continuing series of essays addressing the inherent pragmatism of modern physics. Let's call this a "Primer" on String Theory.

So, string theory is in trouble.

For those readers who haven't watched the excellent NOVA special "The Elegant Universe" in the form of streaming Quicktime movies on the PBS website, and hence do not know what is meant by the phrase "string theory:" more power to you. You are exactly in the same place as me on this plane of understanding, and I've spent the last week and a half pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose, poring over endless layman's explanations of the stuff.

There is a little I've managed to infer. I know that the most exciting and relevant thing about string theory is its attempt to consolidate the two existing major theories of modern physics: General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. As they stand, GR and QM contradict one another significantly, making it practically impossible for physicists to explore crucial problems -- the birth of the Universe, for example -- without negating one of these two conceptual pillars. String theory, like Supersymmetry before it, ostensibly brings the two together. Scientists, therefore, consider it a building block for a potential "Theory of Everything," making it a big deal in essentially every conception of the phrase.

String theory supposes, radically, that the Universe is not made up of infinitesimally small particles as we've pretty much always believed, but rather of equally small (in fact, smaller!) pulsating, coiling, psychedelic little strings. In order to make this assumption mathematically, we must imagine a Universe with significantly more dimensions than our three-dimensional minds can conceive of. In this case, the word "dimension" refers to mathematical dimension: as, in a certain sense, time is considered a "fourth" dimension of the known world. We can't see the seven extra dimensions that string theory postulates, because they are outside of the realm of scientific and human understanding. However, we guess that they're everywhere -- even right here, right now. Insane extrapolations of string theory have professors rationally, calmly, informing the lay public that there do, in fact, exist unknown and infinite amounts of parallel universes within grasp of our own, perhaps mere inches away from our noses, that we will never be able to touch.

Obviously the idea of string theory being "in trouble," conceptually, is completely incomprehensible. How can its supposedly solid foundations be shaken, right? It seems to me that the foundations of string theory are already firmly planted in a puddle of dreamcatchers and "Sliders" re-runs. I mean, to most of humanity -- the people, I think, primarily concerned with an ultimate understanding of the universe (UUU) -- a world made of tiny strings is as much a stretch of the imagination as is a world made up of tiny atoms, or of a world created by a divine being, for that matter. I'd take it further: I think that for most people, it is harder to believe in 11 dimensions than it is to believe in God. At least God is like, a dude.

On some level, string theory is completely pragmatic in the sense that it is a truth seemingly embraced entirely for its function -- as a peacemaker for the frustrating rift between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and as an easy (albeit, theoretically, so complex that I imagine only a few luminary people fully understand it) way out of an embarrassing theoretical problem.

NEXT ENTRY: Why is String Theory in trouble? Who is defending it? Are the proponents of Intelligent Design gnashing at the gates now? Isn't it cool to live in a Multiverse?

I have this concept I've been running around with for a while. It's called the "Fourth Grade Nightmare Fantasy." It functions on two basic scales: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic. Both sides of the spectrum, however, share the same basic gesture of being a worst-case scenario situation envisaged by your average ten year old (in this case, myself, but run with it). Microcosmic FGNFs entail things we have all endured: forgetting your memorized poem during the talent segment of the Junior Rose Princess qualifying pageant, for example. Macrocosmic FGNFs, however, are ludicrously misinformed -- and yet staggeringly logical -- conclusions and hypotheses about the universe (Universe) come to by children who are still at the age where they think that hand-building a spaceship is a realistic game plan. You know: What if you fell through a hole in the earth and then went through its core until you started falling up, What if Dinosaurs weren't dead but actually just hiding, What if Scientists could create mini black holes on earth which would then suck up the earth and destroy the universe? The key thing about the Fourth Grade Nightmare Fantasy is that the level of importance and the depth of the implications of both Microcosmic and Macrocosmic FGNFs are completely equivalent in the mind of the fourth-grader. A healthy balance, in my opinion.

However, I've recently found that the ultimate tripped-out science news moments happen when a former Nightmare Fantasy, or something which might as well have been one, is enacted in reality. This happened to me some time ago as I was reading up on the most recent crashings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven Laboratories in Long Island. Physicists there have been colliding stripped-down gold ions at each other at frighteningly close to the speed of light, and have found, in physics-news-dork-parlance, that they "haven't been behaving as expected." They were trying to trounce particles together so hard that they would break down into quarks and somehow become quark-gluon plasma, a super-dense substance allegedly present in the moments after the Biggest Bang. Physicists at the CERN in Switzerland (where, incidentally, my uncle works) nearly accomplished this in 2000. In any case, the physicists at Brookhaven ended up losing the gold ions -- on impact, they would just vanish in these little fireballs that were quickly dubbed by the now-recalcitrant New York Times as "very small black holes." Doomsday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Any fourth-grader worth their trapper-keeper could conspiratorially inform you that Black Holes, by nature, swallow up everything in their path, only growing in power and strength as they go, like Katamari Damacy or the Blob. Humanity's inherent fear of the amorphous aside, the relativistic collisions at Brookhaven are terrifying on a pure FGNF level. The Brookhaven collider -- a 16 million dollar piece of equipment -- then Long Island, then the United States, the world, then the oceans, then the expanding Universe: all swallowed up by a pulsing, hyper-dense, golden black hole? It's almost as bad as getting caught wetting your pants in grade school by Christina Bushnell, who would immediately rat on you to all the other girls. Scary, right? Scary in a totally unrealistic and crippling way, right?

This is to say, of course these subatomic black holes -- which only exist for the briefest of nano-instants anyway -- are not going to suck up the earth, hidden dinosaurs and all ("Before Brookhaven began its gold collision experiments in 2000, it issued assurances that the experiment could not accidentally create a black hole that would destroy the earth. Laboratory officials say that is still the case."). It is news items like these, however, that awaken the fourth-graders in all of us and send them quivering under their apple juice-soaked lefty desks. The ostensible adults we have turned into are then faced with a hard task: to grab those clammy, grubby hands and thrust them (US, man) back into the real world -- a world sadly void of giant lizards or the potential for galactic apocalypse.