February 17, 2005

Strings

It fell my privilege the other evening to attend a lecture by Brian Greene, the famous astrophysicist and apologist for “string theory.” It was an exhilarating event attended by over 500 people.

As he talked, he took us gently by the hand and walked us down the path from Einstein’s general theory of relativity to Heisenberg’s relative theory of generality (my phrase, not his). It was so vivid, his teaching style, that one could almost reach out and scoop up the gravitons by the light of all the photons passing by.

It came as a real surprise to me, though, that as Greene moved in on his main point, strings turned out not to be strings as I had imagined like on Chet Atkins’s guitar, twanging and singing away in some space/time reel, but crinkly little circles shaking and dancing inside the quarks and leptons that power the whole universe, us, included.

I never did quite get the reason why the physicists are so proud of their strings (they are metaphors, you know) but I was pleased that they seem to get so much mileage out of them.
For it is further comforting to know that they turn more and more to metaphors to say what they mean. The church has been out in that communication briar patch for a long time, but never, it seems, able to create quite so much excitement.

Anyway, I was sitting by a senior in one of our swishy local private high schools. She hung on Greene’s every word just as I had and, it seemed, understood most of them just as I had not. When the time came for Q&A, she kept trying to get his attention, but to no avail. I asked her afterwards what was her question. She said she wanted to ask why it is that the string theory is now so widely discredited among younger astrophysicists.

I wondered on the way home, why is it that catching up is always so hard to do?

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