Monday 14 September 2009

String Theory There are two areas of research that we don't know much about and where research over the next twenty years: Quantum Mechanics and String Theory. In this article I'm going to discuss String Theory why we think all things are made up of strings. String Theory is a contender for The Theory of Everything and is based on the principle that all things are made up of tiny 1-dimensional superstrings. The first ever String Theory was formulated in the late 1960s and was called Bosonic String theory. However, soon afterwards it was abandoned as it predicted the existence of a particle that we don't believe to exist and it predict only the position of boson whereas most physical particles are fermions. Then along came the Superstring Theory which predicted a 10-dimensional universe. This was then split in to five versions of this theory. However, all these versions seemed to be right but this wasn't possible. Here, we introduce Edward Witten who has been hailed as the next Einstein. He looked at all these theories and decided that they were all different ways of saying the same thing. He then went on to unite these theories in what we call M-Theory which is based on a 11-dimensional universe. This is just basic theory behind string theory but for more advanced reading go to Wikipedia.