String theory is a concept that has been around for centuries and is one of the most controversial and unproven of all physics ideas. It’s basically the notion that everything in the whole world is connected via one big network. As of yet, there is no concrete evidence to prove string theory correct, but that hasn’t stopped physicists from trying.
Ed Witten is the top living string theorist, and around a year ago he wrote a piece about string theory of what he felt everyone should know. It started off by explaining how many similarities there are within the world. For example, the way a pendulum oscillates is analogous to a planet orbiting a star. And, have you noticed how there are remarkable similarities between that of gravitational waves, light waves, and water waves yet all are from completely different origins?
Quantum field theory is where you take a particle and add up all the different ways it could have got to its present state to calculate the single particle’s state. Because the theory is based on the curvature of spacetime, the average is worked out over all spacetime geometries. Another thing to remember is the only possible 1-D surfaces are an open (two unattached ends) or a closed string (a loop is formed). It’s much easier to work with quantum gravity as is one dimension, but to get a complete picture, the next step would be to move to 3+1 dimensions (this is the Universe’s three spatial dimensions and one-time dimension). But, this could become very difficult, so instead of calculating the behavior of a single particle, the theory is that it could be calculated as a string.
Rather than deal with points and interactions, instead you work with surfaces that may be curved in non-trivial ways. It is also inferred that you can get a quantum theory of gravity in spacetime from string theory. String theory certainly does offer a path to quantum gravity and both the General Relativity and Standard Model theories can be derived from it. It still is, and probably always will be one of the most active areas of physics research and a dream of many a physicist.
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