![]() In string theory, there are no elementary particles (like electrons or quarks), but pieces of vibrating strings. It naturally and inevitably includes gravity as one of the fundamental interactions. This is one of the most attractive features of string theory. 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. “The area of fuzzball and microstate geometry phenomenology is a budding new field where many exciting insights and observations lie ready for the picking,” he concludes.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. Mayerson also suggests next steps for instruments and finer measurements that could reveal evidence for the “fuzzball paradigm,” drawing out a roadmap for the near future. Researcher Daniel Mayerson has a new, sweeping survey (updated with the peer-reviewed journal link) of the existing body of knowledge about fuzzballs. With fuzzballs, the fundamental strings stop working together and simply crowd together, becoming a large, well, ball of strings. n a neutron star, atomic camaraderie breaks down and dissolves, leaving behind just neutrons crammed together as tightly as possible. He continues: “Inside a neutron star, matter is compressed into its highest density state possible. ![]() Instead, they’re like neutron stars, which are well, almost black holes. “In string theory, black holes are neither black nor holes,” Sutter explains. ![]() But they come from the same one idea, at least. There are different mathematical models that haven’t coalesced into one emerging majority yet. But in the mid-20th century astronomers began to find objects that looked like black holes, acted like black holes and probably smelled like black holes too.”įuzzballs might be separate from black holes, or they might be a subset that’s contained within the field of black holes-scientists aren’t sure. Of course, there's no such thing as an infinitely tiny point, so this picture seems wrong. Once a certain critical threshold is reached, the clump of matter just squeezes and squeezes, compressing down into an infinitely tiny point. f a clump of matter crunches down into a tiny enough volume, then gravity can become overwhelmingly strong. ![]() ![]() ’s Paul Sutter explains the big mental “tangle” with black holes: “Black holes appear in Einstein's theory of general relativity, and by all rights they simply shouldn't exist. Positing a tangled string idea instead doesn’t even require much more of an ideological buy-in. This sounds far out, but we don’t understand a great deal about how black holes work to begin with. □ Get unlimited access to the weird world of Pop Mech. What if string theorists have been right all along, and black holes are just balls of yarn? These celestial rat kings, scientists say, represent a place where a huge bunch of fundamental strings have tangled together and can’t be extricated. Black holes are enigmatic and require a different kind of thinking in the first place.The math is still emerging, but the right instruments could maybe detect the fuzzballs.Little-understood black hole phenomena could be string-theory "fuzzballs," scientists say. ![]()
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