Files From the Edge Read Free

later copied by scientists in many fields including Carl Sagan. In case you were wondering, I did not change my major; I was informed that there were more opportunities in chemistry than physics in the worlds of industry, research, and education.
    Dr. Morrison passed over in 2005 at age 89. When he died, this world lost a great man and, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant minds since Isaac Newton. Dr. Morrison’s legacy continues to this day—he encouraged a group of young scientists (including myself) to look further for answers and not to be limited by what you have learned from your teachers.
    A New Theory Reveals Another Reality
    In 1976, Daniel Z. Freedman, at SUNY Stony Brook proposed an idea that the universe was connected together by a four-dimensional force he called “super gravity.” [1] Within five years of Dr. Freedman’s published paper on the subject, our view of the cosmos grew larger, and it was found that super gravity could not explain the correct state of the universe; a forgotten idea called “string theory” was once again taken seriously. In the twentieth century, the popular view of the geometrical design of elementary particles that make up matter was that they are small spheres, so small that more than 100 trillion of them lined up could fit on the head of a pin and still have plenty of room. However, string theory states that the building material that makes up the elementary particles are much smaller and not spheres but two-dimensional strings with a length of one billion trillion trillionth of a centimeter (very small).
    String theory was originally developed during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a never completely successful attempt to tie all the forces in the universe together and provide the physicists with a neat package of all and everything. [2] In the 1960s, Dr. Geoffrey Chew, then professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, discovered that mesons had unusual spins that could not be explained at the time. [3] This was later explained by Nobel laureate Dr. Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago and Dr. Leonard Susskind of Stanford University to be the relationship that would be expected from rotating strings. Dr. Chew advocated making a theory for the interactions of these trajectories that did not presume they were formed by fundamental particles, but two-dimensional strings. At first, string theory was considered (by the older, established scientific community) to be nothing more than a pipe dream invented by a group of wide-eyed scientists who allowed wild speculations to cloud their logical scientific judgment. Since the established scientific community at that time was so skeptical of the idea of strings holding the universe together, the theory was not seriously considered until the mid-1980s.
    String theory is actually a theory of gravity and an extension of general relativity where vibrating strings are the glue that ties all the forces in the universe together. In string theory, all the properties of these elementary particles (which include charge, mass, and spin) come from the string’s vibration. The more frequent the vibration, the more energy and mass the particle will possess. The sequence in which a number of strings vibrate will determine if they will become neutrons, protons, electrons, leptons, or other types of more exotic particles. As with a stringed musical instrument, the wire must be stretched under considerable tension in order to vibrate at a particular frequency, in this case the force would have to be close to 1040 tons. This is one of the flaws in the theory; scientists have yet to find this great celestial tension load required for a string to vibrate.
    The Guitar and the Universe
    To understand string theory a little better, consider the idea of a guitar being tuned. The tension and thickness of the string will determine what musical note is produced when played. Each note produced by the string can correspond to the