Collider may provide proof for string theory of physics

PROVO — One of the most significant moments in the history of science may come after a new particle collider starts work this year beneath the Swiss-French border, according to a renowned physicist, Brian Greene.

The Large Hadron Collider just might prove that the controversial "theory of everything," string theory, is true.

Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, New York City, and author of best-selling books on string theory, spoke Tuesday at Brigham Young University's Marriott Center.

His book, "The Elegant Universe," was developed into a three-part series broadcast by PBS. "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality," the title of his latest book, also was the name of the lecture.

"Space and time are the most familiar and yet most enigmatic concepts in science today," Greene said, but they are not what our senses would lead us to believe.

"We are learning that reality is not what we think it is. The very basis of existence is not what we think it is," he said.

At the turn of the 20th century, Albert Einstein asked himself how gravity worked. How could the sun reach across 93 million miles and affect the motion of Earth? He struggled with the question for 10 years.

By 1915, Einstein had come up with the General Theory of Relativity as an answer. Einstein pictured space-time as something like a big rubber sheet. When something massive, like the sun, weighs down a portion of the sheet, it causes a distortion in it, and a smaller object will roll around and around the pit.

"Einstein says take that idea and apply it to the cosmos," Greene said. Thus, a planet will circle the sun because the sun causes a deformation, like a pit, in the fabric of space-time.

Rather than static, fixed features, "space and time can actually do something. Space and time push things around," he said. Each person "affects the shape of space; in fact, the shape of time as well."

General Relativity works beautifully on the large scale. But scientists realized that Einstein's ideas were in conflict with another proven theory, that of quantum mechanics, which covers the very small scale.

"Quantum mechanics is a very mysterious, strange, really mind-boggling subject," Greene said.

Quantum effects have been proven in the laboratory. The ideas "are confirmed by experimental observation." A famous feature of quantum mechanics is that one may know one aspect of an electron, such as its speed, without being able to know another, such as its position — and vice versa.