• Question: What is string theory?

    Asked by attic123 to Chia-Yu, Helen, Matthew, Matt H, Rhod on 19 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Matt Carnie

      Matt Carnie answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      String theory is a very complex theory to describe the basic fundamental nature of the elementary particles that make up all matter. It’s understood by people far far cleverer than me I’m afraid.

    • Photo: Chia-Yu Lin

      Chia-Yu Lin answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Actually, I do not know what is string theory until I watch TV show, called Big Bang Theory. However, I am afraid this is beyond my understanding.

Comments

  • Photo: attic123

    attic123 commented on :

    thank you any way chia-yu lin

  • Photo: attic123

    attic123 commented on :

    thanks any way

  • Photo: attic123

    attic123 commented on :

    can any one else awnser my question

  • Photo: Claire

    Claire commented on :

    Hi attic!

    String theory is a theory we have about the way the universe works.

    Currently we think of the universe in terms of particles – there are particles that make up matter, and particles that carry force. These particles all come together in something called the Standard Model (SM), and they together make everything we can see in the universe.

    The SM is a great theory because it has been proven to be super accurate in all of our experiments. But there are some problems with it. One, for example, is that there is no gravity in the theory!

    Clearly this is wrong. We cant have a theory about the universe without gravity!! So what now?

    Well, that’s where string theory comes in. String theory is a theory about stuff even smaller than these particles. String theory says that things aren’t made of particles, they are made of tiny tiny strings.

    Now, just like a guitar string can vibrate in different ways and produce different sounds, so can these tiny strings vibrate, and they produce different masses. So each “particle” is actually a string vibrating at a different frequency.

    The nice thing about string theory is that it has gravity in it too… however, this only works if we live in a universe with 11 dimensions! (not the 4 up/down, left/right, forward/backwards and time we currently know about)

    But the problem is we don’t know if string theory is correct, because we haven’t yet been able to do an experiment that can test it out (limitations on our technology).

    We need to continue to do science and develop our accelerators and technologies, so that one day we can hopefully test if string theory is correct.

    Hope that helps! 🙂