Friday math movie – string theory
Einstein’s contribution to mathematics and science was profound.
He developed ideas following on from Maxwell’s famous Wave Equations, which hinted at the connection between magnetism, electricity, energy and the speed of light.
So while 19th century physicists felt that they pretty much knew all the fundamental theories of the universe, the early 20th century saw an explosion in the development of science and mathematics.
Newton’s ideas of gravity were not sufficient to explain the behaviour of light, so Einstein proposed various solutions to try to explain what gravity was all about. But even Einstein’s theories have been undergoing further refinement and development through the 20th century.
This week’s video gives some background to the concept of string theory. String theory suggests that the building blocks of the universe are 1-dimensional vibrating strings of energy, rather than 0-dimensional point-like particles.
[Update: This video is no longer available from YouTube. It was a copyright violation.
Too bad.]
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4 May 2009 at 4:38 pm Link to this comment
The movie can’t be watched.
4 May 2009 at 4:45 pm Link to this comment
Thanks for alerting me, Li-sa.
The movie has disappeared from YouTube. I have updated the post.
6 Jun 2009 at 8:54 pm Link to this comment
You don’t have to disappoint readers though. The video belonged to a 3-hour-long programme called “The Elegant Universe” by PBS and the link is:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html
7 Jun 2009 at 7:29 am Link to this comment
Thanks, Li-sa. That’s a great find.
And it appears that the segment is no longer available on YouTube because of this statement on the PBS page:
It’s great that they still make the videos available for watching online.