A Foucault's Pendulum. (credit: Flickr user luciasantamaria)
We have a beautiful theory that puts each of nature's forces into a single, neat package. The whole of it can be summed up in a single line of very compact—and for most, including me, incomprehensible—mathematics. At least, that is what we would like to be able to say, but this beauty is marred. Imagine the Mona Lisa with an eyepatch drawn in using crayon.
That is modern physics. The eyepatch is gravity.
There are many ideas about how to remove the crayon eyepatch from the masterpiece of modern physics and create a single, unified theory, but there's little evidence to support any of them. Among the ideas are theories involving extra dimensions (like string theory). And for nearly 10 years, physicists have been fruitlessly searching for evidence for these hidden dimensions.
Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment