The Grand Cosmic Symphony !!
I got a chance to understand completely and appreciate the terms that were puzzling me earlier , like “string theory” , the eleven dimensions , unification of forces and so on.I grabbed a copy of The Elegant Universe by Brain Green.Thanks to Sridhar anna.
It started with discovery of gravity by Newton and went on to describe the effort taken , then on by the physicists to know the mind of God.It was so elegant in style and narration that it easily made even laymen understand the mind of Albert Einstein,and his thirst towards the unification of forces.
And how he could not just digest the degree of unpredictability discovered by Quantum mechanics and he said ,”God does not throw dice!!”.
I wondered at the amazing work by physicists like , John Schwartz , Michael Green and Edward Witten (who unified the five different sting theories which were existing and created the M theory).The strings (open ended and closed ended) , branes , parallel universes , collision between them etc were amazingly pictured. I was always not able to fully comprehend the extra dimensions and this video made a lot of effort to make people comprehend it.It talked about , the circles representing an additional spatial dimension that is curled up within every point of our three dimensional space and the six dimensions needed for the super strings to vibrate.One more video which helps in understanding the tenth dimension is here.
Will CERN or Fermilab be able to discover the S particle , the escaping graviton ? Will string theory be proved right ??Will it end up to be a waste of wonderful mathematics and physics over twenty years ?? God knows !! But , we are all blessed to live in an era where we have awesome physicists who try to comprehend the mind of God !! And we are gifted with resources to understand and appreciate their work !!Whether string theory succeeds or not , it will always remain a fascinating idea to me!!!
Hi,
The book does present stuff in an elegant way. But I found the book really hard as it went forward. Though I started the book way back during the end of our final semester, I completed it only recently, still with loads of doubts.
But if you like that book, you will probably like to read the Theory Of Everything by the man who started this thirst, Stephen Hawking. It was indeed a great read and easier to understand than The Elegant Universe. I would also recommend The Fabric of Universe by Greene. Though I couldn’t get a copy myself, a friend spoke very highly of that.
Balachandran
December 12, 2008 at 4:54 am
Hi,
Sorry, that was Fabric of Cosmos by Greene, not Fabric of Universe.
Balachandran
December 12, 2008 at 4:59 am
yeah .. Theory of Everything is in my queue next
krithikasubramanian
December 12, 2008 at 7:54 am