Right.
And to explain a brick all we need is eleven dimensions and an infinite number
of universes.
The 11 is 10 and the 'infinite number of universes' is an alternative idea, not
physical theory.
I suppose by "11" you are referring to 'superstring theory.' M-theory, though,
includes all of the extent superstring theories. It does so through sensible
space-tearing conifold transitions, in that any given Calabi-Yau space can be
transformed into any other. By varying the string coupling constants and
curled-up Calabi-Yau geometry, all string constructions are just different
phases of a single theory. This theory is M-theory.
If curious about more on this, see "Black Hole Condensation and the Unification
of String Vacua" by Brian R. Greene, David R. Morrison, and Andrew Strominger in
Nucl. Phys. B451 (1995) pp. 109-120.
It's a creative idea and I think it's very interesting. But it's not used in
physics now and it is definitely not broadly accepted. Glashow has been an
adamant antagonist, for example. And he's no slouch.
However, Strominger and Vafa, in 1996, building on Susskind and Sen, put out a
paper called "Microscopic Origin of the Beckenstein-Hawking Entropy." They were
able to use superstring theory to precisely calculate the associated entropy of
certain kinds of black holes. They meticulously wove a precise combination of
so called 'D branes' into these black holes and were able to exactly predict the
observable macro-characteristics in this way. They could mathematically count
and thus demonstrate the various observable properties, from the ground up so to
speak. And they could compare these with the entropy predicted by Bekenstein
and Hawking, with perfect agreement! This was the first successful application
of superstring theory to solving a problem that had already been solved through
entirely different means and it helped to support the idea that M-theory may be
applicable to nature.
So I've no idea what you are dissing-on about.
Do you not like quarks, colors, flavors, and charm? Standard model physics to
"out there" for you? Don't like SU5 extensions and grand unified theories? Got
something better one can use to make quantitative predictions?
It disgusts me to imagine that the
www.godchannel.com site might be taken as
anything at all similar to M-theory. There is no similarity, despite the fact
that M-theory isn't at all complete. At least it *does* have a successful
prediction under its confirmation belt and has many more that show promise of
being tested.
Here's a snapshot of how it developed. Maybe seeing that track record will help
you see the difference -- though I hardly think any of this should be needed.
(This will be from memory and I won't get credit to all the names I should...)
....
It started out early on as a much different thing altogether, as an approach to
providing some exact calculations for quantifying the concept of the strong
nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons in the nucleus of most atoms (not
hydrogen-1.) The quark theory was undergoing a lot of research at the time
(mid- to late- 1960's) and still hadn't figured out the strong nuclear force.
So Chu developed an s-matrix approach to solving the pion-nucleon strong force,
working out 7 symmetries that the s-matrix would have to obey and from which the
strong force could 'bootstrap' itself. This was a competing idea to what the
quark theorists were working on, at the time. Veneziano then came up with a
single equation that exhibited 6 of the 7 required symmetries and decided to
publish it. Chu's team at Berkeley felt that Veneziano's publication seriously
supported their ideas and hailed it as 'proof' of their ideas.
But meanwhile, experimental evidence that the color force in quarks actually
gets weaker when they get closer (a surprise a lot of people had a hard time
accepting, without looking very closely) had arrived. And in 1973, quark
theorists (actually, the three were grad students, one of them was David Gross
who was a grad student of Chu's and was actually trying to prove the opposite,
in support of Chu's ideas) came up with a solution called 'asymptotic freedom,'
a theory out of SU3 group theory, that appeared to provide the needed
explanations from the quark side of the house. And in 1974, the first charm
particles had been finally discovered, capping a prediction made in 1964 by
Glashow (his symmetry-breaking paper), I think. Things were looking completely
solid for the quark folks.
Back in the s-matrix camp, Suskind and Nambu were able to show that Veneziano's
equation was nothing more -- at least in the case of bosons like the pi-mesons
-- that it was exactly what one got if you treated the two quarks in these
bosons as being tethered by a string that rotated at the speed of light. They
weren't able to solve the fermion case, but they appeared to have solved it for
bosons. Several problems, though. It required 26 dimensions (suddenly, John
Conway's work on 26-dimensions became useful, despite his desire that no one
find them so) to make it all work out. The problems with 26-dimensions and the
lack of the ability to deal with fermions left this unsatisfying. Still, it was
here that string theory got its name.
This bothersome part of this new string theory, the ridiculous number of
dimensions and the lack of fermions being included, was fixed in 1971 by
assuming a supersymmetry -- and this got the dimensions down to 10
simultaneously with including fermions into the theory. Much better. Thus, the
term superstring theory.
Another bothersome part of this new string theory was that it predicted that the
most probable boson would be a massless spin-2 boson. At the time, no one
realized what that might be. But by the time the quark theorists were in their
heyday, in 1974, Joel Scherk and John Schwartz noticed that these spin-2 bosons
were exactly what was required for gravitons and they recommended that
superstring theory become a theory about gravity. But this paper was lost on
most physicists because of the successes with quark theory at the same moment.
Meanwhile, Glashow and others were working to augment the standard model with
SU5 and produced grand unified theories (GUTs.) By 1979 or so, this was pretty
much done. (The Higgs particle remains the only undiscovered particle(s)
predicted by the standard model.)
Michael Greene got interested in the superstring theory side and roped John
Schwartz (Joel Scherk had died) into helping him develop this into superstring
theory (supersymmetry + string theory) and in 1984 published their seminal paper
on the subject.
Superstring theory has become an idea that promises to unify the other four
forces with gravity. Perhaps a better chance we have of that, right now. Don't
like 10 dimensions? So what? It's a theory -- it's not designed to be liked,
but to unify and to predict.
Jon
