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Transcript
October 24, 2003
NARRATOR: It looks like wiggling spaghetti, but it helps
illustrate what might fulfill Einstein's dream—to combine all
the laws of the universe into one single theory.
STEVEN WEINBERG (1979 Nobel Prize in Physics): We
don't have a guarantee. It isn't written in the stars that we're
going to succeed. But in the end we hope we will have a single
theory that governs everything.
NARRATOR: As shown on PBS's NOVA, Einstein's theory of
relativity is good at explaining big things like the motions of
planets and stars. But the littlest things—atoms and subatomic
particles—are governed by completely different rules called
quantum mechanics. To physicists, that's like living in a city with
two separate sets of traffic laws. Now, what scientists call string
theory has the potential to unify the big and the small with tiny,
vibrating strands of energy called strings that could be the basic
ingredient of everything in the universe. But there's a problem:
although scientists can predict them mathematically, strings are so
small that no current technology can detect or measure them.
SHELDON GLASHOW (1979 Nobel Prize in Physics): It's a
kind of physics which is not yet testable. And I was brought up to
believe and I still believe that physics is an experimental science.
It deals with the results to experiments or in the case of
astronomy, observations.
NARRATOR: But the person who shared a Nobel Prize with
Glashow has a different idea.
STEVEN WEINBERG: I think, 100 years from now, this particular
period will be remembered as a heroic age when theorists tried and
succeeded to develop a unified theory of all the phenomena of
nature. But ask me 100 years from now, then I can tell you.
NARRATOR: Until then, it's a controversy that will continue
to divide the physics world and string the rest of us along. I'm
Brad Kloza.
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