A little heady thinking for you on a Sunday with this interesting thought from Scientific American about the use of String Theory in comics. Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex-Machina is the main example. I may not understand what it all means, but by saying “String Theory,” I feel smarter.
It’s interesting to see other areas of media or content types talk about comics, and it looks like Scientific American is attempting to be cool with some of the content on their site… fun stuff.
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So Ron you tryin’ to get a physics conversation going on iFanboy. I’m no physicist but I am interested. From what I understand string theory has been supplanted by membrane theory (M-theory). String theory initially had 10 dimensions (the 4 we are aware of: height, length, width and time, plus 6 more subatomic dimensions we are unable to perceive and are associated with these tiny strings). Membrane theory added more dimensions in order to try and make the math work.
What is the math trying to work out? The unified field theory or the theory of everything. That is making Gravity/Magnetism and quantum mechanics work together or “link up” mathematically.
Why? some may ask. Because if we are able to do this (which we will eventually) we will make magic happen. Like control gravity, space-time, get around the speed of light. Comic Book fantasy powers will be real. Just as the things we are able to do today are god like to compared to what humans were able to do say 2000 years ago.
Hey, glad you brought it up. maybe a real physicist can correct any mistakes in my layman’s explanation.
I’m a physicist, and you pretty much nailed it. Although, i don’t specialize in string theory, i have read the elegant universe which is a great book for anyone to learn more about quantum mechanics and M-theory without any background in math.
You just gave away next week’s pcik of the week.
At the risk of making this thread a little too high-brow, the fat doctor from Sliders used to talk about string theory all the time. Great show.
I am actually currently reading some books on this subject. And a good starting place, even though some are obviously outdated, would be the books by Michio Kaku. And obviously the works of Stephen Hawking. Very interesting stuff.