String Theory (layman

description)
----------------------------------
What is the true nature of the universe?

To answer this question, humans come up with stories to describe the world.

We test our stories and learn what to keep and what to throw away.

But the more we learn, the more complicated and weirder our stories become.

Some of them so much so, that it's really hard to know what they're actually about.

Like string theory.

A famous, controversial and often misunderstood story, about the nature of everything.

Why did we come up with it and is it correct?

Or just an idea we should chuck out?

To understand the true nature of reality, we looked at things up close and were amazed.
Wonderous landscapes in the dust, zoos of bizarre creatures, complex protein robots. All of them
made from structures of molecules made up of countless even smaller things:

Atoms.
We thought they were the final layer of reality, until we smashed them together really hard and
discovered things that can't be divided anymore:

Elementary particles.
But now, we had a problem:

They are so small that we could no longer look at them.

Think about it: what is seeing?

To see something, we need light, an electromagnetic wave. This wave hits the surface of the
thing and gets reflected back from it into your eye. The wave carries information from the object
that your brain uses to create an image.

So you can't see something without somehow interacting with it. Seeing is touching, an active
process, not a passive one. This is not a problem with most things. But particles are But particles
are very, But particles are very, very, But particles are very, very, very small. So small that the
electromagnetic waves we used to see are too big to touch them. Visible light just passes over
them. We can try to solve this by creating electromagnetic waves with more and much smaller
wavelengths.

But more wavelengths, means more energy. So, when we touch a particle with a wave that has a
lot of energy it alters it. By looking at a particle, we change it. So, we can't measure elementary
particles precisely. This fact is so important that it has a name:

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

The basis of all quantum physics.

So, what does a particle look like then? What is its nature?

We don't know. If we look really hard, we can see a blurry sphere of influence, but not the
particles themselves. We just know they exist.

But if that's the case, how can we do any science with them?

We did what humans do and invented a new story:

A mathematical fiction.
The story of the point particle.

We decided that we would pretend that a particle is a point in space.

Any electron is a point with a certain electric charge and a certain mass.

All indistinguishable from each other. This way physicists could define them and calculate all of
their interactions. This is called Quantum Field Theory, and solved a lot of problems. All of the
standard model of particle physics is built on it and it predicts lots of things very well. Some
quantum properties of the electron for example have been tested and are accurate up to

0,0,000,00000,0000000,000000000,00000000000,0000000000000,0000000000002 %.

So, while particles are not really points, by treating them as if they were,

we get a pretty good picture of the universe. Not only did this idea advance science, it also led to
a lot of real-world technology we use everyday.

But there's a huge problem:

Gravity.
In quantum mechanics, all physical forces are carried by certain particles. But according to
Einstein's general relativity, gravity is not a force like the others in the universe. If the universe is
a play, particles are the actors, but gravity is the stage. To put it simply, gravity is a theory of
geometry. The geometry of space-time itself. Of distances, which we need to describe with
absolute precision.

But since there is no way to precisely measure things in the quantum world, our story of gravity
doesn't work with our story of quantum physics.
When physicists tried to add gravity to the story by inventing a new particle, their mathematics
broke down and this is a big problem. If we could marry gravity to quantum physics and the
standard model, we would have the theory of everything. So, very smart people came up with a
new story.

They asked: What is more complex than a point?

A line-

A line or a string.

String theory was born.

What makes string theory so elegant? is that it describes many different elementary particles as
different modes of vibration of the string.

Just like a violin string vibrating differently can give you a lot of different notes, a string can give
you different particles

Most importantly, this includes gravity. String theory promised to unify all fundamental forces of
the universe.

This caused enormous excitement and hype.

String theory quickly graduated to a possible theory of everything

Unfortunately, string theory comes with a lot of strings attached.

Much of the maths involving a consistent string theory

does not work in our universe with its three spatial and one temporal dimensions.

String theory requires ten dimensions to work out. So, string theorists did calculations in model
universes. And then try to get rid of the six additional dimensions and describe our own universe

But so far, nobody has succeeded and no prediction of string theory has been proven in an
experiment So, string theory did not reveal the nature of our universe.

One could argue that in this case string theory really isn't useful at all.

Science is all about experiments and predictions. If we can't do those,

why should we bother with strings?

It really is all about how we use it. Physics is based on maths.

Two plus two makes four. This is true no matter how you feel about it.

And the maths in string theory does work out.

That's why string theory is still useful.

Imagine that you want to build a cruise ship, but you only have blueprints for a small rowing boat.

There are plenty of differences:

the engine,

the engine, the materials,

the engine, the materials, the scale.

But both things are fundamentally the same:

Things that float. So, by studying the rowing boat blueprints,

you might still learn something about how to build a cruise ship eventually.

With string theory, we can try to answer some questions about quantum gravity that have been
puzzling physicists for decades.

Such as how black holes work or the information paradox.

String theory may point us in the right direction.

When used in this spirit, string theory becomes a precious tool for theoretical physicists and help
them discover new aspects of the quantum world and some beautiful mathematics.

So, maybe the story of string theory is not the theory of everything.

But just like the story of the point particle, it may be an extremely useful story. We don't yet
know what the true nature of reality is but we'll keep coming up with stories to try and find out.

Until one day, hopefully, we do know.

Black Hole
CIVILISATION
B
lack holes are the largest collections of pure violent energy in the universe. If you come
too close, they'll devour you and add your energy to their collection. And so, the energy is
lost to us forever.

Or is it? It turns out there's a universe cheat code.

A way of powering civilizations until the very death of everything, or of constructing the largest
bomb in the universe.

But how?

Didn't we learn that all energy is trapped forever in black holes, even light?

This is true.

Everything you think you know about the weirdest thing in the universe is about to get weirder,
for one simple reason:

Black holes are spinning.

When really really massive stars die, their cores collapse under their own gravity into black holes.

This means something very big becomes very, very tiny. Like the tiniest anything can be in this
universe. But stars are rotating and a fundamental property of our universe is that things that are
spinning don't want to stop spinning.

We call this: angular momentum.

And this angular momentum can't go away. A big thing that spins and becomes smaller, spins
faster. So, as the core of a star collapses, its momentum makes it spin faster and faster and
faster, until it collapses into a black hole . And the black hole keeps on spinning, inconceivably
fast. Some of them spin millions of times a second.

Just like non spinning black holes, ...spinning black holes have an event horizon and a singularity
at their core, where all of their mass is concentrated.

The singularity is usually described as a single infinitely small point with no surface area.

But points can't rotate, so a rotating singularity can't be a point.

Instead, it's a RINGularity.

A ringularity is a ring with a thickness of zero and no surface, spinning extremely fast, containing
all the mass of the black hole. The black hole is spinning so fast, that it morphs space and time
itself.

It literally drags space with it, such is its power.

This creates a new and super weird region of space-time: the Ergosphere, which envelops the
black hole. If space and time are completely broken inside the event horizon, then they're only
half broken inside the ergosphere.

Inside the ergosphere, nothing makes sense.

It's possible to enter it and then leave it again, but it's probably not a great experience. You can
imagine it like this: Falling into a static black hole is like sliding down a hole.

Being inside the ergosphere of a spinning black hole is like spiraling down a deadly drain. The
black hole transfers its own kinetic energy in the form of rotation, to everything that enters the
ergosphere.

The ringularity makes you dance whether you want to or not.

You need to move faster than the speed of light just to stand still here, which is impossible.

But here's our cheat code: We can steal this energy, and there's a lot of energy to steal. Take the
supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

We could steal as much energy from it as every single star in the Milky Way emits in a billion years
combined.

The easiest way to steal this energy is, oddly enough, to drop something into the black hole.
We've seen that the ringularity forces energy on us when we enter the ergosphere,

...which is a lot like being in a whirlpool, with space-time rushing around and around.

If you're clever you can use the water to your advantage, and swim faster than before.

In practice, this means sending a rocket into the ergosphere, and making a trade with the black
hole:

We give it some mass-energy, and it gives us some of its rotational energy.

But it's not a fair trade, we get the better deal.

Normally, if you fire a rocket, you exchange chemical energy for kinetic energy. This is like
pushing yourself forward in a swimming pool.

But if you fire a rocket inside the ergosphere, it's like pushing yourself forward in a wave pool.

The rotational energy of the waves gives you a much stronger boost than you could get just by
pushing yourself.

The boost from the rotation of the back hole is so big, that you leave the ergosphere with much
more energy than you entered it.

The black hole gives a tiny amount of its rotational energy to you, and slows down a little.

Obviously, this requires a lot of food.

Fortunately, black holes aren't picky eaters.

An advanced future civilization would probably harvest asteroids to drop them into the black
hole when they needed an energy boost.

But there's an even better way to get energy from a black hole, and oddly enough, it builds the
biggest bomb any living thing could ever hope to build:

We only need two things to build a black hole bomb: a fast-spinning black hole, and a big mirror.

The mirror has to completely envelop the black hole,

...which is similar to a Dyson Sphere, a mega structure that harvests the energy of an entire star.

Although, our mirror would be easier to build.

Mirrors are simpler, and black holes are much, much more compact than stars.

If we made the mirror 10 centimeters thick, the metal of a big asteroid would probably be enough
material for a black hole with the mass of our Sun.

Once our mirror is in place, we only need to open a window, and shoot electromagnetic waves at
the black hole. You can imagine what happens next, by imagining tossing a ball at a wall, and it
coming back faster than a bullet.

The waves hit the black hole at light speed. A small proportion of the waves falls past the event
horizon to disappear forever. But a much larger amount sloshes through the ergosphere,
...where the black hole forces some of its rotational energy on them, and amplifies them.

They now begin superradiant scattering, which are fancy science words meaning: "Bouncing
around between mirror and black hole and getting stronger." Every time they go around, they
are getting exponentially stronger.

By opening some windows in the mirror, we can extract the energy from the waves as fast as
they grow. Which we could use, in theory, to create what would be for all practical purposes, an
endless source of energy for trillions of years.

Or, we could blow it up.

If the waves are not released, they will continue to get stronger and stronger, ...and take more
and more energy from the black hole, until the mirror shatters.

A supermassive black hole would release as much energy as a supernova,

...making the bomb the largest explosion any living being could ever create.

The beauty of the black hole bomb, the Penrose process, and the super radiant scattering, is that
they are not science-fiction.

In the far far future, this might be the only way to survive in our dying universe.

After all the red dwarfs have cooled down, and all the white dwarfs transformed into black
dwarfs, the universe will turn dark forever.
Rotating black holes might be the only sources of energy in the entire universe that life could
harvest. If so, the last living being in existence might one day end its life around a black hole.

Which is equally chilling and uplifting.

It turns out that even without any light, there are places we can go.

Black holes are as interesting as they are mysterious, but there's actually a surprising amount we
do know. Using math we can calculate things and come up with theories about how we die if we
fall into them.
WHAT is DARK MATTER and DARK
ENERGY?
Matter, as we know it;
Atoms, stars and galaxies, planets and trees, rocks and us.
This matter accounts for less than 5% of the known universe.
About 25% is dark matter; and 70% is dark energy.
Both of which are invisible.
This is kind of strange because it suggests that everything we experience is really only a
tiny fraction of reality.
But it gets worse. We really have no clue what dark matter
and energy are, or how they work. We are pretty sure they exist though. So, what do we
know?
Dark matter is the stuff that makes it possible for galaxies to exist. When we calculated
why the universe is structured the way it is, it quickly became clear that there's just not
enough normal matter.
The gravity of the visible matter is not strong enough to form
galaxies and complex structures. The stars would more likely be scattered all over the
place and not form galaxies.
So, we know there is something else inside and around them.
Something that doesn't emit or reflect light. Something dark... but besides being able to
calculate the existence of dark matter,
we can see it... kind of. Places with a high concentration of dark
matter bend light passing near by. So we know there's something there that interacts
with gravity. Right now, we have more ideas about what dark energy is not, than what it
is!
We know dark matter is not just clouds of normal matter without stars, because it would
emit particles we could detect.

Dark matter is not anti-matter,

because anti-matter produces unique gamma rays when it reacts with normal matter.
Dark matter is also not made up of black holes, very compact objects that violently affect
their surroundings, while dark matter seems to be scattered all over the place. Basically,
we only know 3 things for sure;
1. Something is out there.

2. It interacts with gravity.

3. There is a lot of it.

Dark matter is probably made up of a complicated exotic particle hat doesn't interact
with light and matter in a way we expect, but right now, we just don't know.
Dark energy is even more strange and mysterious. We can't detect it, we can't measure it
and we can't taste it. But we do see its effects very clearly.

In 1929, Edward Hubble examined how the wavelength of light

emitted by distant galaxies, shifts towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum
as it travels through the space.
He found that fainter, more distant galaxies showed a large degree of red shift; closer
galaxies, not so much.
Hubble determined that this was because the universe itself is expanding.

The red shift occurs,

because the wavelengths of light are stretched as the universe expands. More recent
discoveries have shown that,
the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Before that, it was thougth that the pull of
gravity would cause the expansion to
either slow down or even retract and collapse in on itself at some point. Space doesn't
change its properties as it expands; there's just more of it.
New space is constantly created everywhere, galaxies are tight bound clusters of stuff
held together by gravity so we don't experience this expansion in our daily lives. But we
see it everywhere around us. Wherever there is empty space in the universe, more is
forming every second. So, dark energy seems to be some kind of energy intrinsic to
empty space.
Energy that is stronger than anything else we know and it keeps getting stronger as time
passes by.
Empty space has more energy than everything else in the universe combined. We have
multiple ideas about what dark energy might be.

One idea is, the dark energy is not a thing, but just a property of space. Empty space is
not nothing, it has its own energy.
It can generate more space and is quite active. So, as the universe expands, it could be
that just more and more space appears to fill the gaps and this leads to a faster
expanding universe.
This idea is close to an idea that Einstein had back in 1917,
of the concept of a cosmological constant, a force that counteracted
the force of gravity. The only problem is, that when we tried
to calculate the amount of this energy the result was so wrong and weird, that it only
added to the confusion. Another idea is, that empty space is actually full of temporary,
virtual particles that
spontaneously and continually form from nothing and then disappear into nothing again.
The energy form those particles
could be dark energy. Or maybe dark energy is an unknown kind of
dynamic energy fluid or field which permeates the entire universe,
but somehow has the opposite effect on the universe than normal
energy and matter. But if it exists, we don't know how and where or how we could
detect it. So there are still a lot of questions to answer.

Our theories about dark matter and dark energy are still just that
theories.
On one hand, this is kind of frustrating, on the other hand this is frontier science making
it very exciting. It shows us that no matter how much we feel we're on top of things, we
are still very much
apes with smartphones, on a tiny fragile island in space looking into the sky wondering
how our universe works There is so much left to learn, and that is awesome.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------