[Ghost]

One of the core principles of physics is that particles - for example particles of light radiation - behave both as particles (which you'd expect) and as waves (which is just mental). Physicists call this duality of particles: confusing. The confusing properties of particles allows physicists to bamboozle people and get grants.

Imagine a wave of particles streaming out across space. Wouldn't that look like a great, long, wiggly string? You bet your unscientific ass it would! Is that string theory? You bet your unscientific ass it isn't! However, it does demonstrate that particles - any particles - can form long strings. There are long string streams emanating from the Sun right now, washing up against buildings and reflecting colours into your eye holes. There are strings of radiation particles bursting forth from your monitor, crashing up against your face, and running down cracks in your skin to cancerfy your intestines too. There are streams of strings everywhere.

You may be thinking: "all this talk of streams is making me want to pee. Is that string theory?" No, that's your prostate trouble flaring up again. I told you anal sex was dangerous.

Gravity is everywhere in the universe and as such it needs energy to keep it running. As luck would have it there is an awful lot of energy in all those particle strings all over the place. An awful lot. To demonstrate just how much energy is present in strings you can perform a string theory experiment of your own.

String Theory Experiment
You will need:

• a string of christmas tree lights
• a tree
• a bag

Step one: decorate a tree with the christmas tree lights.




Step two: undecorate the tree.




Step three: put the lights in the bag.




Step four: put the bag in your loft.




Step five: wait one year.




Step six: retrieve the bag


Step seven: untangle the string of lights.


What you will discover is that a seemingly inoffensive string with plastic bulbs on it somehow stores staggering levels of energy within.

Now imagine if you'd put two strings of lights in those bags. Pretty scary, huh? What about an infinite number of strings? A bit harder to imagine, but I'm sure you're getting the picture.

The universe is like that bag in the loft containing more christmas tree lights than you can imagine. Every planet is a bulb; many of the bulbs are broken. The person trying to unravel all those strings is the Space-Time Vortex Marmoset Queen. The energy expelled by the Space-Time Vortex Marmoset Queen in unravelling the christmas tree lights is what we know as gravity. And that is string theory explained simply.

Next time on Science for Dummies...

Why the Space-Time Vortex Marmoset Queen doesn't like you poking around her black holes.

[Fred Rubble]

I'm hip! I'm hip!

[dooshman]

String theory? What about the dual nature of light? Is it a particle? Or is it a wave? Gravity, you say? Well ... what exactly is it? Einstein's General Theory of Relativity states it's a distortion of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. No mention of strings there. Perhaps you're referring to the strings of a guitar. Right now I'm thinking of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Hendrix and George Harrison.

Oh, pardon me. I'm kind of losing it there.

Okay. Back to the string theory. Uh, we were on gravity. Yes. So, there is Einstein, still pondering the Unified Field Theory, in which all the fundamental forces of nature can be explained in single mathematical equation (he was probably thinking along the lines of Tensor Analysis, but we won't go there). Okay. Introducing the Quantum Theory. Hooray for fellows like Heisenberg and Bohr. So, anyway, here were these two dudes trying to convince Dr. Einstein that, indeed, "God does play dice with the universe." But Dr. Einstein was not to be swayed, and, thus, he stuck with his "classical" theory that all motion is predictable. No so in quantum dynamics, my friend. You see, it is impossible to determine both the speed and momentum of a particle at any one time. No strings yet. Okay. Let's see. Hmmm.

I'm thinking of a computer string, that is, as it applies to a programming language, like C++, Java, Visual Basic, etc. A computer string is an array of alpha-numeric characters used to represent data in human, readable form. This brings to mind the dudes at Bell Labs, in the early 70's, the inventors of the C programming language. Guys like Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan took painstaking efforts to come up with a programming language that was portable, fast and as close to the hardware as Assembly Language. One pitfall, though, was there was no way to define a string. In the early days of C, these Bell Lab’s dudes used null-terminating character arrays to represent words or sentences.

Ah, strings! Where would the world be without them? Well, for one thing, we sure would have a hard time keeping our shoes on our feet.

There I go again, getting lost in thought.

By its basic understanding, the string theory attempts to do what Dr. Einstein had tried … but failed; that is, to create a unified field theory explaining all the fundamental forces of nature. However, that in itself is a challenge that no one has yet even close to proving. The string theory has and still remains the stuff of theory and conjecture.

[Gh007]

Well it explains why a particle cant be trapped at any one moment because at that size people have always thought of things like this

But instead of a singularity, like an absolute position of molecular structure, its a harmonic. String Theory is only a theory because it hasn't had time to change the paradigm paralysis.

But please Dooshman don't let me get you started

[GODREKR]

Don't get Dooshman started? Shit! So there I was, quantifying the molecular structure of the universe when it struck me. It hurts! Fucking hell it hurts!

[Gh007]

^^^^

[vnathan]

[thissiteisfuckedup]

i love all this physics stuff but it is way to complicated for me to go learn,id rather watch it on tv like steven hawkings theory of everything.. ahhh

[Blewvane]

Pull the wrong string and all you have is a bloody tampon.

[GODREKR]

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