Sunday, November 28, 2010

String Theory and Special Relativity and Sex


So the idea behind string theory is that the world is not made up of particles. The world is made up of strings. The strings themselves are not the only things out there - there are also branes, for instance. A brane is kind of like a membrane. Imagine a string that's been ironed so long that the fabric of the string became flat and... membraney. These strings and membranes vibrate. It's the vibration that determines the property of something, whether we perceive it as matter or energy, for example.


Special relativity simply means that everything has the same amount of energy. Everything is moving with the same energy. For our purposes, let's call that the speed of light. That movement, however, goes in two directions. One of them is in space. That's what normal people call movement. The other is movement in time. Now it turns out that we spend the vast majority of our energy by moving forward in time. Things that move very very fast - close to the speed of light, in fact - are experiencing something called time dilation, meaning that they move SO FAST that they don't spend much, or indeed, any energy on moving forward in time, they spend it all on movement through space. So a photon - let's call that a particle of light, if you will let me - is the same age when it gets here from the other end of the universe as when it was 'born', since it has been moving at the speed of light. So it did not spend any energy in aging, in moving forward in time.


So to imagine the universe, imagine a very messed up tangle of string and rotted fabric in a bucket of boiling glue bubbles in 10 to 26 dimensions.


Doesn't this all turn you ON?

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