For the physicists among us:
A possible alternative to string theory. (The actual paper appears to be linked at the bottom of the article.)
One of Einstein's big unfulfilled goals was the Theory of Everything, a physics theory that could successfully explain the four 'fundamental forces': electromagnetic force, which results in, naturally, magnetism, electricity, but also light; gravity, currently understood to be a pull in space-time between objects; the weak force, which governs radioactive decay; and the strong force, which governs molecular bonds, like the kind that makes the H2 and the O stick together to make water. The problem has been that we've never been able to manage gravity, except through a concept called 'string theory', which basically posits that all matter is in fact tiny strings when seen through at least 12 dimensions. I'm not doing it justice in this small space, because it's really complicated and not many people fully understand it.
The possibility here is that, unlike quantum physics which is a similar mindscrew but actually appears to work, string theory might not even exist. There's a history in physics that wrong theories tend to seem, in hindsight, to be overly complicated: earth-centric models of the solar system were forced to declare that all the planets orbited around a moving point, which itself went around the earth, as if they were moons of an invisible planet (this being called epicycles); the explanation for why things burn, which we know today is that they have a reaction that's powered by oxygen and releases heat and light energy, was originally that things that could burn contained 'phlogiston', which it turned out could not be detected in any other way and had to have a negative mass (so it's basically anti-oxygen); and the big bang theory had a contemporary rival in the steady state theory, which ended up declaring that cosmic background radiation, a discovery of what is essentially the echoes of the Big Bang and is considered one of the absolute slam dunks in scientific history, was light from ancient stars, while the universe essentially wraps around like the Eighth does from north to south. The big exception here is quantum physics, which is weird and complicated but it's internally consistent and reflects the fact that what it's explaining is itself highly weird.
I'm interested to hear what our physicists think about all this: as far as I can tell, it seems more promising than string theory, which has always had a whiff of the epicycles about it to me, and it's also feasible that it'd only turn up now because the key thing it relies on was only discovered earlier this year; but on the other hand it's entirely possible that it's one of those solutions that are simple, elegant, and wrong, and fits coincidences together to make a Potemkin village that doesn't hold up to investigation.
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What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?
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×Lost.
