Published in the June 10-23, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures
A photo still from the movie “Interstellar” features Matthew McConaughey dealing with Einstein’s general relativity effects in the universe.
Marty Cheek
At lunch at Rosy’s at the Beach a couple of months ago, Morgan Hill Life editor Robert Airoldi set me on the challenge of writing a Bigger Picture column on superstring theory with the mandate that I can’t bore readers. Superstring theory is a frontier of physics that might be obscure to many Americans. Superstrings may very well one day, if proven as scientific fact, create technologies that would verge on what we would now consider to be miraculous in exploring space and time.
I told Robert that if I can explain superstring theory to a class of third graders at Barrett Elementary School and get them excited about this science field, I might be able to educate our readers on this complex but utterly fascinating realm of theoretical physics without losing their interest.
For the past two months, I’ve pondered about how to write about superstrings. Then one recent afternoon, while stopped at the traffic light on Tennant Avenue and Butterfield Boulevard heading downtown, I happened to look up at the Lick Observatory’s white domes on Mount Hamilton. One of those ah-ha moments hit me. The key to the column is to start with the most brilliant mind in modern day physics — Albert Einstein.
The famous physicist has a couple of connections to the Lick Observatory. The most well known is that during the Lick Fire that started the afternoon of Sept. 3, 2007 and raged for eight days across 47,000 acres in Henry W. Coe State Park, the conflagration destroyed a cabin where a San Jose State University professor kept a collection of scientific papers and letters written by Einstein. All the documents turned to ashes.
Decades before the fire, however, the Lick Observatory played a crucial role in proving Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which he published a century ago in 1915. General relativity went beyond Einstein’s 1905 E = mc2 special theory of relativity by providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time — or space-time. If you saw the actor Matthew McConaughey in the movie “Interstellar” save the world by going through a wormhole to a black hole and visit planets where space is warped so much that time there goes by much slower than time on Earth (a crucial plot point), then you’ve seen general relativity in cinematic action.
In 1922, the Lick Observatory sent a science expedition to Australia to study a solar eclipse and see if light from stars bent around the sun. The astronomers then would use photographs to measure this displacement extremely accurately. If displacement proved the case, the expedition would help demonstrate that a large mass like our sun did indeed bend space-time, giving evidence supporting Einstein’s controversial general theory of relativity. The expedition was led by William Wallace Campbell, the director of the Lick Observatory. Data obtained from the eclipse indeed provided evidence backing Einstein’s theory.
The 1920s were an exciting time for not just relativity but quantum mechanics as well. Scientists such as Max Planck were exploring the Alice in Wonderland world of the bizarre behavior of tiny particles that make up atoms. Decades later, what both Einstein and the quantum mechanics scientists discovered played a crucial role in creating the Silicon Valley technologies we use today including computers, smart-phones and satellite communication.
Unfortunately, these two realms of physics presented an embarrassing problem for scientists. The principles of relativity and its focus on the force of gravity applying to large-scale structures (such as stars) did not jive with the principles of quantum mechanics, which applies to the three other fundamental forces of electromagnetism, strong nuclear and weak nuclear which act on an atomic scale. It was as if Einstein played a grand Beethoven symphony while the quantum physicists played improvisational jazz. A Grand Unified Theory — a “theory of everything” — needed to be found to reconcile this discrepancy in the two proven fields of physics.
And that’s how superstring theory comes into this column. As I explained to the third graders, superstrings are incredibly tiny energy “strings.” I asked the kids in their imagination to take a meter stick and cut it into 10 sections and throw away nine of them. Then take the remaining meter stick and cut it into 10 pieces and throw away nine. Do this again and again for a total of 34 times and you’ll come to the incredibly minuscule scale of strings.
The tiny strings vibrate in various ways, thus creating particles and the four fundamental forces of the universe. It is as if the universe is a magnificent cosmic orchestra of stringed instruments playing the symphonic music that makes up the stars, the planets and life itself.
String theory is theoretical physics — which means that scientists can now only examine it through the medium of math. At this point, no experiment has been done to prove that superstrings are real or not real. But just like Einstein’s general theory of relativity was first simply theoretical until proven by the 1922 solar eclipse experiment, one day scientists might figure out a way to prove or disprove the theory.
One aspect of string theory is that it opens up the possibility of multi-verses. There might be an infinite number of universes, among which our universe is just one. Another aspect of superstring theory is that is describes our universe as having as many as 10 or 11 dimensions. We are familiar with three of them: up/down, right/left, front/back. Another is the temporal dimension of time. Scientists have worked out through mathematics and computer visualization the intriguing forms of some of the various other spacial dimensions.
So as I gazed at the Lick Observatory that afternoon and pondered Einstein’s relativity versus quantum mechanics and how the two sciences can be harmonized through the concept of superstrings, the traffic light must have been green for a while because someone behind me honked their car horn. I put my foot on the gas and turned left onto Butterfield Boulevard, plotting this column out as I drove downtown and hoping that Morgan Hill Life’s editor might concede that superstring theory can indeed be something that might not bore readers.
