Strings-n-Things

I admittedly have a very narrow understanding of science… mostly because to be a true scientist requires levels of mathematical knowledge that I just can’t wrap my mind around. But I do enjoy reading and watching “pop culturilized” versions of scientific concepts. I recently posted a blog about my fascination with evolution as explained by prolific and eloquent authors such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. But lately my real fascination has come from the world of physics.

My intrigue began when I saw the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, which gives a very trippy yet accessible primer on the nature of Quantum Theory (though I thought the movie suffered by turning into too much of a new age “self-help” commercial a la The Secret). Less than a month after watching What the Bleep, I was hired to write a classroom video series about Quantum Theory. That’s when I realized that the movie really REALLY oversimplified the theory. I had to learn QT from the ground up and it wasn’t easy. I literally read the book they gave me about ten times from beginning to end and went through about five drafts of the scripts before I finally started to grasp not only the ideas but their implications. A few months later, the same company hired me to write another series about Relativity and the learning process began all over again. Briefly, for the uninitiated, Quantum Theory and Relativity are two very different aspects of physics. Overly-simply put, QT deals with the world of the very very small (atoms, electrons, quarks, etc) while Relativity deals with the world of the very very large (planets, galaxies, black holes, etc). The problem is that the two theories don’t jive with each other. Those equations and experiments that produce nice neat and tidy results when examining the forces of black holes, produce completely ludicrous results when examining the movements of electrons. And vice versa. In a universe that is supposed to obey strict, orderly and well-defined laws, the fact that there isn’t one universal set of equations to govern the very large and the very small has, quite frankly, been driving scientists batshit for the better part of the last century.

Enter String Theory. For the last thirty or forty years, this has been THE THEORY that was supposed to unify the two worlds. I’m not going to go into all the aspects of it (there is an awesome NOVA series online that breaks it all down), but overly simply put, the theory states that all matter and energy is made not of particles or waves but of infinitesimally small vibrating strings. Right now the theory is based entirely on complex (excruciatingly complex) math. There’s no way to test it simply because there’s no microscope powerful enough to observe something so small as a “string”. But the math, if it’s accurate, does two things. First of all, it seems to prove, mathematically, a lot of the trippy, f---ed up, whacked-out theories about parallel universes and diverging timelines that I have personally come up with over the years (often under the influence of THC). But more importantly for the world at large, String Theory seems to do what scientists have been hoping for by linking Relativity with QT… albeit with one caveat: the only way it works is if there are more dimensions than the four we know about.

Aside from one version of string theory (which puts the number of dimensions at 26) almost every other version puts the number at a much more familiar value: 10. Ten dimensions! If this turns out to be true, how freakin’ cool would that be? That would mean that the entire universe operates on a number that is the very basis for our entire numerical system. And the only reason that 10 is the basis for our entire numerical system is almost quaintly simple: because we have ten fingers. The bible says God made us in His image. Is that a literal truth? Does God look like a man? Or is God simply a Being of numbers and perfection – a 10^th dimensional being? Since He is considered to be All and Everything, is He essentially the embodiment of every dimension… numbering 10? Did he give us ten fingers to somehow represent that fact? We always think of Heaven as being “up in the sky.” Maybe Heaven won’t involve a three-dimensional “up”. Maybe Heaven (or Nirvana or Enlightenment) will mean rising to a higher dimensional plane. The Bible says that at the end of the world we will become like Jesus. Maybe that means we’ll be elevated from our three dimensions to something “higher” and more closely resembling God.

I can remember while studying for the Relativity series, reading something about the expansion of the universe. Again, overly-simply put, there were three ways the universe could have expanded immediately following the Big Bang. There could have been too little “bang”, causing all the density of matter to almost immediately collapse back into itself. Or there could have been too much “bang” causing all that matter to fling so far and so fast that it never had the chance to coalesce into galaxies, stars and solar systems. And then there’s the third way it could have gone. A perfectly balanced “bang” that allowed everything to fling outward and yet still come together into the order we see now. Physicists equate this to the idea of balancing a pencil on its tip. Theoretically it’s possible that you could do that. But you’d have to balance it absolutely perfectly and hope that no outside force (wind, bumping the table, a truck driving by on the street) altered its positioning by even a fraction of a millimeter. The Universe apparently formed like that. Perfectly. HOW THE HELL? Scientists check and recheck the math and they say it just doesn’t make sense that the universe should have formed this way. Like seriously, nothing in nature has ever formed in such harmony. I’m paraphrasing and probably (again) oversimplifying the matter, but the fact remains, the Universe formed PERFECTLY! How do you even begin to wrap your mind around how utterly amazing that is?

I find it disappointing that so many people interpret science and faith to be such disparate and incompatible concepts. For people of deep religious faith, so many scientific theories amount to little more than heresy, serving only to take glory away from God. On the flip side of that coin, it seems like a lot of scientists think that even entertaining the possibility of a supreme being somehow detracts from the beauty, wonder and logic of the Universe… and ultimately makes one a bad scientist. Yet so much of what I see in both science and religion seem to compliment each other in ways that are almost illogically perfect. It boggles my mind that more people don’t make this leap.