string theory
In: Physics
I don’t think it’s possible to really eli5 this, but at its most basic the idea is that instead of being a small point, particles are made of loops of string. These strings vibrate, and the patterns in their vibrations determine what kind of particle they are. A rough analogy is that it’s like when you pluck a guitar string, how it vibrates determines the note we hear.
You can take this idea and use it to describe the particles we know of, and more importantly particles we suspect exist like the graviton, which is to gravity what a photon is to light. The catch (one of many) is that these strings need to vibrate in more than three dimensions of space to explain the properties we observe.
This is the part where ELI5 kind of falls apart, and we get into the handwavey parts of the explanation. Given that we can only observe three dimensions of space, there must be something very different about the other 8 dimensions of space. The current string theories suggest that they are too small for us to observe, and that means they are extremely small given the precision we can measure at.
With that said, why string theory is probably easier to ELI5. We have two very successful models of the universe, general relativity and quantum mechanics, but trying to combine them leads to neither of them working. So humanity has spent almost a century looking for a grand unified theory. For that century long stretch of time, the greatest human minds have wrestled with the issue, and basically came up empty handed.
String theory is meant to bridge that gap, but as a layman who has followed it for a few decades, in my completely unqualified opinion, it’s not really doing a great job. It hasn’t made any predictions that disagree with our current models that we can test. That lack of falsifiability makes it dangerously close to pseudo science.
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