The Elegant Universe. String's the Thing

Description

This program opens with a whimsical scene in a movie theater in which the history of the universe trails backwards to the big bang, the moment at which general relativity and quantum mechanics both come into play, and therefore the point at which our conventional model of reality breaks down. Then it's string theory to the rescue as physicist Bryan Greene describes the serendipitous steps that led from a forgotten 200-year-old mathematical formula to the first glimmerings of strings - quivering strands of energy whose different vibrations give rise to quarks, electrons, photons, and all other elementary particles. As Greene explains, scientists are able, for the first time, to combine the laws of the large and the small into a harmonious theory of everything. But even with its success, as of the 1990s, physicists realized that the "strings" theory suffered from a pernicious flaw - there were five different versions. A new question was now on the rise: we have one universe, so shouldn't there be one theory of everything?

Runtime

60 min

Series

Subjects

Genre

Date of Publication

[2011], c2003

Database

Films on Demand

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