My brane hurts
My Brane Hurts
Did you ever want to be a theoretical physicist when you grew up? I know I did. I used to read popular accounts of cutting edge research in New Scientist, Scientific American and sometimes whole books about how a Grand Unified Theory of Everything was just around the corner. And I always assumed that one day I would really understand these ten-dimensional supersymmetric exploding plastic incomprehensibles they were talking about.
Sadly, life went on to prove conclusively that I wasn't clever or motivated enough to do that sort of ultra-physics, and I figured out that even if they found a Theory of Everything (even if I found one) it wasn't going to help me get a girlfriend. So I kind of drifted away from physics.
But now I'm back as a spectator/hanger-on/minion in academic life, and I have just enough credibility that noone is going to throw me out of a seminar, and today there's one on current developments in string theory:
With the discovery in recent years that strings theory contains a great richness of structures --- the theory includes membranes of diverse co-dimensions, the so-called d-branes, as well as its well-known stringlike excitations --- much work has been devoted to studying the possibility that our entire observable universe resides on a (3+1)-dimensional brane, with all low energy excitations with the notable exception of gravity confined to this brane.
OK, that does sound just a little bit daunting, I agree. But don't worry;
The seminar will include a fair amount of background material for non-experts.
Well, you don't get much more non-expert than me. So I went along. And I'd say I "understood" the first ten minutes or so, in the sense that I've heard or read about the whole ten, eleven or twenty-six dimensional space full of wiggly things approach before. Of course, after that my mind split open, but that's to be expected. This talk had more of an emphasis on cosmology than I've seen before from sting-theorists, and as a bonus the speaker described something (a quark? the universe?) as being "sort of like a soap bubble except in a relativistically invariant way."
And, you know, sometimes life can be a little bit like that, can't it?
I know mine is.