Nick Cook – A Ramble Through an Oxford Author's Imagination and Inspiration

Nick Cook – A Ramble Through an Oxford Author's Imagination and Inspiration

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Showing posts with label Particles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Particles. Show all posts
Musical Notes and the Universe of String Theory
04:05

Musical Notes and the Universe of String Theory
“You are the music while the music lasts.” 
– T.S.Eliot
When you pluck a guitar string a sound wave is produced that vibrates the air molecules producing a musical note that you hear. Imagine that the universe around you is the product of a similar vibration. That’s what string theory is all about.

Picture the smallest known building block in the universe, smaller than an atom, smaller than electron, smaller than a quark, and peer inside any of these and you’ll see a dancing filament of energy called a string. Just how small are we talking here? Well, if you scaled up a hydrogen atom to the size of the universe, the string inside it would only be the width of a human hair.

Why the need for string theory at at all? After all don’t we have Einstein and his theory of gravity that accurately deals with very large objects such as planets and stars. We have quantum mechanics which explains what happens with the very small. However, the problem for physicists is that these theories can conflict with each other. There are also shortfalls in these theories that tell us that we don’t fully understand how the cosmos works. For example Einstein’s gravity theory simply can’t cope with what happens inside the extremes of a black hole. Therefore the search has been on for a theory that ties everything together has been on – sometimes referred to as the grand unification theory. Step centre stage and meet the candidate that attempts to unify the very large, the very small, gravity, and even time itself – string theory.

All particles around us go through four basic interactions: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear interactions, and weak nuclear ones. Einstein covered gravity, and quantum mechanics dealt with the rest, but string theory attempts to tie everything together. 

String theory suggests that when a string vibrates, unlike a guitar string producing musical notes, particles are actually created. Also, by changing the frequency of the string, any sort of particle can be made. It’s an elegant theory, but for the maths behind it to work, it requires more dimensions than the four we can currently observe. In addition, at the heart of string theory, is the idea that gravity is a particle that we have so far failed to detect, the graviton. This particle is also predicted by quantum theory, as was the Higgs Boson, whose existence now looks confirmed by the Large Haldron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. The graviton is another juicy boson and there is a chance that the LHC may be able to confirm its existence as well.

If string theory is proven to be correct, it may answer questions that have baffled science for some time such as black holes, the existence of extra dimensions, dark matter and dark energy; and even the origin and fate of our universe itself. And it may be that the LHC provides the stepping stone towards confirming string theory’s credentials.

 Related Articles

 Higgs Boson – The Treacle of the Universe 
http://therealnickcook.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/higgs-boson-treacle-of-universe.html

 Splitting Reality – The Many Worlds Theory 
http://therealnickcook.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/splitting-reality-many-worlds-theory.html

 Part of Our Universe is Missing – A Big Part 
http://therealnickcook.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/part-of-universe-is-missing.html

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Part of the Universe is Missing – A Big Part!
07:49

Part of the Universe is Missing – A Big Part!
"Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be."
– Albert Einstein 
(Image Credit: NASA)
There’s a search going on that started at the beginning of the 70’s, when observations revealed that something wasn’t quite right with the universe – part of it was missing! 
The reason that we know it’s there is because of its effect on what we can actually see. To start with the stars at the edge of galaxies are moving to fast, there seems to be extra stuff exerting an influence. This stuff might be invisible but we know it's there. If it wasn’t there there wouldn’t be enough gravity to hold the stars together and everything would fly apart and chaos on a galactic scale would ensue.
Another piece of smoking gun evidence, is an optical effect observed around some distant galaxies. When the Hubble Space Telescope was pointed towards the massive Abell Cluster 2218, the gravity pull around it was so great it actually bent light around it, turning the whole region into something known as a gravitational lens. Using this technique Hubble was actually able to see through it, regions at the very edge of the universe. It took some amazing images such as the one above, stuffed full of galaxies. However, once various measurements were taken, it was soon realised that the light was being bent too much. In other words the combined mass was greater than anything that we could measure, meaning a lot of the mass was invisible. As far as dark matter is concerned we believe to be around 25 percent of the mass of the universe.
So what could dark matter be? The best guess is that it’s some sort of exotic hidden particles we are yet to discover. 
But this isn’t all that’s missing. There’s another 70 percent lost back down the back of the galactic sofa and we have labelled this dark energy. We have even less idea about what this could be. We are just starting to understand that space isn’t nothing, but is instead a rich area stuffed full of dark energy, whatever it might be.
So if you do the sums, that means there’s 5 percent that we can see and currently understand. That’s the observable universe today. So when you see those Hubble images, etc, we really are just seeing the peek of a very big iceberg, the rest floating beneath the visible waterline.
The below YouTube video provides a very neat overview of all this missing stuff.




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Now You See Me, Now You Don’t
08:43

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."  
– Albert Einstein
The world is real isn’t it? You're in it so of course it must be, but have you ever wondered what happens to the universe when you turn your back on it? 

Some quantum physicists believe that electrons and even the nucleus of the atoms all around us, exist everywhere at the same time. This is called super positioning, where matter exist as waves, that is at least until we get involved. The moment it is observed and the spotlight of our senses sweep across, it stops being a wave and locks into position as a particle in our reality.

It’s a bit like that child’s game Statues, in which the curator turns their back on the other players. They then have to try to sneak up and tag the curator, but the moment the curator turns they have to freeze into statues, Now imagine the children could be everywhere at once and you have a reasonable metaphor for how reality may actually work. The curator, the observer, you, turns and the world becomes solid. In other words we create the world as we experience it! 

Makes you wonder what would happen if you turned your head quickly enough, what you might catch from the corner of your eye.
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