String theory today doesn't exactly match string theory of the 1960s and '70s. It needed a total of 10 dimensions, with six visible only to the perspective of the little strings, much as a powerline looks like a 1D line to birds flying far overhead but becomes a 3D cylinder to an ant crawling on the wire. The next step, theorists hoped, would be to find the right way to describe the folding and movement of strings, and everything else should have followed.īut that initial simplicity turned out to come at the cost of unexpected complexity - string math didn't work in our familiar four dimensions (three of space and one of time). In addition to taming gravity, string theory was attractive for its potential to explain so-called fundamental constants like the mass of an electron. A string of a particular length striking a particular note might gain the properties of a photon, another string folded and vibrating with a different frequency could play the role of a quark, and so on. String theory turns the page on the standard description of the universe by replacing all matter and force particles with just one element: tiny vibrating strings that twist and turn in complicated ways that, from our perspective, look like particles. "A one-dimensional object - that's the thing that really tames the infinities that come up in the calculations," string theory expert Marika Taylor, a theoretical physicist at the University of Southampton in England, told. String theory math required six additional dimensions (for a total of 10) visible only to the little strings, much as a powerline looks like a 1D line to birds flying far overhead but a 3D cylinder to an ant crawling on the wire. Strings, and only strings, can collide and rebound cleanly without implying physically impossible infinities. One possible solution, which theorists borrowed from nuclear physicists in the 1970s, is to get rid of the idea of problematic, point-like graviton particles. Theorists can predict what a gravity particle should look like, but when they try to calculate what happens when two such "gravitons" smash together, they get an infinite amount of energy packed into a small space - a sure sign, according to astrophysicist Paul Sutter in a previous article for, that the math is missing something. Gravity seems not to exist as a particle of its own, either. Instead, its effects are only noticeable and important on the scale of moons, planets, stars and galaxies. But unlike the other forces (electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force), gravity is so weak that it can't be detected or observed on the scale of a particle. It’s one of the four forces that physicists use to describe nature. In Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity is a force that warps space-time around massive objects.
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