A To Z Challenge: Unified Theory And Unraveling The Universe's Mysteries

Unified theory, also known as Grand Unified Theory (GUT) or the Theory of Everything (TOE), is the name for an as-yet undiscovered theory that would unite all the known physical forces into one complete theory. Since Albert Einstein physicists have been attempting to combine gravitation, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism, and by so doing discover a fundamental equation or system that governs the universe.

One theory that holds promise toward producing a unified theory is M-theory. Gathering the attention of physicists like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene, M-theory is the unification of five separate string theories, which it can combine by adding an additional 11th dimension. It's still being hashed out--but string theory has potential to successfully combine all known forces into one.

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Sources:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/614522/unified-field-theory
http://physics.about.com/od/physicsmtop/g/M-Theory.htm
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/qg_ss.html
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/M-theory
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stephen-hawking-cedars-sinai-20130410,0,7704203.story
http://phys.org/news/2011-03-elegant-multiverse-professor-brian-greene.html

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Do you think scientists will develop a unified theory/GUT/TOE within the next few decades? Do you think it will have a effect on society, or that we haven't achieved enough to really take advantage of a fundamental theory?


-----The Golden Eagle

Interviewed At Magpie Bridge! + Teaser Tuesday (86)

I've been interviewed (again!) by Paul Tobin at Magpie Bridge about my blog and my website, The Eagle Directory. I answer questions about the idea behind the site, how I put it together, and why I like eagles in the first place. Check it out!*

*If you want to, of course. And if you do, be sure to take a look around Paul's blog: There's poetry, writing posts, other interviews, all kinds of interesting and well-written content.

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And now, for Teaser Tuesday. This is a weekly--and, of course, bookish--meme hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

Rules for participating:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week, my teaser is from The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. This is the first book I've read by him (though I did watch The Fabric of the Cosmos on PBS a while back, which he hosted--there's also an Elegant Universe TV series) and it's really good. I find his explanations of important concepts in physics easy enough to grasp without feeling like it's significantly dumbed down for the people who don't happen to be theoretical physicists like, you know, Greene himself.

Einstein found that precisely this idea--the sharing of motion between different dimensions--underlies all of the remarkable physics of special relativity, so long as we realize that not only can spatial dimensions share an object's motion, but the time dimension can share this motion as well. In fact, in the majority of circumstances, most of an object's motion is through time, not space.

-p. 49

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Reading any good non-fiction these days? How about fiction? Got any teasers to share?


-----The Golden Eagle