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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Images from The Elegant Universe
String theory kind of bugs me. Or maybe its just the latest offering from the ever-charismatic string theory guru Brian Greene that I found mildly irksome; the three-part TV series version of his book The Elegant Universe. A good friend gave it to me on tape (thank you friend), but Goodreads has posted a link to the episodes online. String theory is pretty groovy: the idea that the fundamental elements of the universe are not tiny particles at all, but vibrating loops. Maybe I'm just crabby cause of Christmas, but the show kind of turned me off the concept.
The show is a science graphics extravaganza. We are continually bombarded with the invitation to "picture" this and "imagine" that. I began to get the feeling that in any given instance, almost any analogy would do. Instead of falling apples to indicate gravity, how about anvils? Instead of slices of bread to indicate parallel universes, how about an ever expanding playlist of different mp3s? The art direction was very catchy but the visual themes seemed haphazard and I started to doubt the use of eye-candy in wrestling with abstractions.* And by extension I started to doubt string theory itself.
Is it a massive stretch to compare theories with pictures? Theories, like Einstein's theory of relativity, or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, do function as a kind of representation. Like a model, or a diagram, they give us a means of sorting information into a configuration that carries meaning. As a lay person absorbing flashy science for a general audience,I am not required to go through the rigours of proving any theories. That's a problem, because I start to see the theories as interchangeable bits of culture, rather than tested modules of scientific knowledge with evidence attached. I do realize that lot of people do a lot of long boring computations on an ongoing basis just so that we can all adopt one theory over the next. And the same goes for string theory. (And the calculations balance!) But, unlike quarks and neutrinos, it just isn't possible to test empirically for evidence of strings.
I wonder, could we just as easily think of the universe as made up of tiny thumb tacks, tacks that poke into the fabric of space time and attach on pieces of other dimensions, so that the universe piles up like layers on an overstuffed bulletin board? Or maybe the universe is made up of cat hairs, that clump into balls in some places, like under the couch, but float freely as individual strips, carrying all kinds of microscopic information as they settle in your spaghetti sauce, or on the bosom of your best black dress. If we spent five hundred years doing the calculations on such a model, is there a chance that we could get the mathematics to work out? I know I'm out on a limb, but I don't think I'm alone in feeling that string theory, at least in the context of Brian Greene's TV show, is just a tad too self-reflexive. There's another word for that...oh yeah, elegant!
(*This could pose a problem for me, since making art images derived from science ideas is one of my ongoing projects.)