Sep 23, 2016 10:23 AM
The Strange Second Life of String Theory
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ry/500390/
EXCERPTS: [...] For a time, many physicists believed that string theory would yield a unique way to combine quantum mechanics and gravity. “There was a hope. A moment,” said David Gross [...] “We even thought for a while in the mid-’80s that it was a unique theory.”
And then physicists began to realize that the dream of one singular theory was an illusion. The complexities of string theory, all the possible permutations, refused to reduce to a single one that described our world. “After a certain point in the early ’90s, people gave up on trying to connect to the real world,” Gross said. “The last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what’s actually out there.” Many, in retrospect, realized they had raised the bar too high. [...]
“We’ve been trying to aim for the successes of the past where we had a very simple equation that captured everything,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf [...] “But now we have this big mess.” Like many a maturing beauty, string theory has gotten rich in relationships, complicated, hard to handle, and widely influential. Its tentacles have reached so deeply into so many areas in theoretical physics, it’s become almost unrecognizable, even to string theorists. “Things have gotten almost postmodern,” said Dijkgraaf, who is a painter as well as mathematical physicist.
[...] Like many a maturing beauty, string theory has gotten rich in relationships, complicated, hard to handle, and widely influential. Its tentacles have reached so deeply into so many areas in theoretical physics, it’s become almost unrecognizable, even to string theorists. “Things have gotten almost postmodern,” said Dijkgraaf, who is a painter as well as mathematical physicist.
[...] Like many of his colleagues, Simmons-Duffin says he’s a string theorist mostly in the sense that it’s become an umbrella term for anyone doing fundamental physics in underdeveloped corners.
[...] Perhaps the field that has gained the most from the flowering of string theory is mathematics itself. [...] String theory has also made essential contributions to cosmology. [...] At the very least, the mature version of string theory—with its mathematical tools that let researchers view problems in new ways—has provided powerful new methods for seeing how seemingly incompatible descriptions of nature can both be true. The discovery of dual descriptions of the same phenomenon pretty much sums up the history of physics. A century and a half ago, James Clerk Maxwell saw that electricity and magnetism were two sides of a coin. Quantum theory revealed the connection between particles and waves. Now physicists have strings....
What Math Looks Like in the Mind
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ng/500621/
EXCERPT: [...] In both groups who participated in the study, the same parts of the brain were more active during the math task—a meaningful finding because it suggests that the ways in which humans process math concepts develop the same way regardless of visual experience.
But something even more surprising took place in the brains of blind participants as they performed math calculations: They were using a part of their brains for math that, among sighted people, is reserved for vision. And the more complex the math problem, the more active that region became. (Among sighted participants, this region of the brain was not active during the math task.) “These results suggest that experience can radically change the neurobiology of numerical thinking,” the researchers wrote in a paper that was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In other words, some parts of the human brain are innately primed for mathematical thinking; whereas others flourish based on experience.
A natural next question is what this means for mathematical skill....
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ry/500390/
EXCERPTS: [...] For a time, many physicists believed that string theory would yield a unique way to combine quantum mechanics and gravity. “There was a hope. A moment,” said David Gross [...] “We even thought for a while in the mid-’80s that it was a unique theory.”
And then physicists began to realize that the dream of one singular theory was an illusion. The complexities of string theory, all the possible permutations, refused to reduce to a single one that described our world. “After a certain point in the early ’90s, people gave up on trying to connect to the real world,” Gross said. “The last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what’s actually out there.” Many, in retrospect, realized they had raised the bar too high. [...]
“We’ve been trying to aim for the successes of the past where we had a very simple equation that captured everything,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf [...] “But now we have this big mess.” Like many a maturing beauty, string theory has gotten rich in relationships, complicated, hard to handle, and widely influential. Its tentacles have reached so deeply into so many areas in theoretical physics, it’s become almost unrecognizable, even to string theorists. “Things have gotten almost postmodern,” said Dijkgraaf, who is a painter as well as mathematical physicist.
[...] Like many a maturing beauty, string theory has gotten rich in relationships, complicated, hard to handle, and widely influential. Its tentacles have reached so deeply into so many areas in theoretical physics, it’s become almost unrecognizable, even to string theorists. “Things have gotten almost postmodern,” said Dijkgraaf, who is a painter as well as mathematical physicist.
[...] Like many of his colleagues, Simmons-Duffin says he’s a string theorist mostly in the sense that it’s become an umbrella term for anyone doing fundamental physics in underdeveloped corners.
[...] Perhaps the field that has gained the most from the flowering of string theory is mathematics itself. [...] String theory has also made essential contributions to cosmology. [...] At the very least, the mature version of string theory—with its mathematical tools that let researchers view problems in new ways—has provided powerful new methods for seeing how seemingly incompatible descriptions of nature can both be true. The discovery of dual descriptions of the same phenomenon pretty much sums up the history of physics. A century and a half ago, James Clerk Maxwell saw that electricity and magnetism were two sides of a coin. Quantum theory revealed the connection between particles and waves. Now physicists have strings....
What Math Looks Like in the Mind
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ng/500621/
EXCERPT: [...] In both groups who participated in the study, the same parts of the brain were more active during the math task—a meaningful finding because it suggests that the ways in which humans process math concepts develop the same way regardless of visual experience.
But something even more surprising took place in the brains of blind participants as they performed math calculations: They were using a part of their brains for math that, among sighted people, is reserved for vision. And the more complex the math problem, the more active that region became. (Among sighted participants, this region of the brain was not active during the math task.) “These results suggest that experience can radically change the neurobiology of numerical thinking,” the researchers wrote in a paper that was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In other words, some parts of the human brain are innately primed for mathematical thinking; whereas others flourish based on experience.
A natural next question is what this means for mathematical skill....