In the words of Brian Greene, a professor at Columbia University and author of a book on the subject,"if string theory is correct, the fabric of our universe has properties that would have dazzled even Einstein."Ībove is a closed string mode that is characteristic of a spin-2 massless graviton (the particle that mediates the force of gravity).
A world where, in fact, the very notion of space and time is bound to disappear. It's a world of 10 dimensions, with some curled up at a microscopic level and some "big" dimensions that we perceive as "real." A world where the distinction between space and time is spurious (as taught by general relativity). If the handful of physicists involved in what are called "superstring theories" (or string, for short) are correct, we live in a world weirder than you can probably imagine. More than 40 years later, Einstein is almost vindicated: The long lasting problem of incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics seems to be on its way to a resolution. He didn't succeed and died without seeing his dearest dream realized. For the last years of his life, he worked on a way to reconcile his own theory of gravitation and the quantum description of the world. While quantum theory, the theory of the infinitesimally small, was being tested with accuracy never attained before, he refused to accept that it was the ultimate theory. For the last 20 years of his life, Albert Einstein was something of an oddity in the physics community, like a beloved eccentric uncle whose favorite subject of conversation draws embarrassed looks around the table.