- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
I've been reading mostly about cosmology, so I've missed much of this good stuff. It all looks at fundamental stuff, but string theories aren't easily accessible. The idea of all physical stuff being epiphenomena of harmonious jigglings of spacetime is interesting, but the maths are beyond most of us. I still haven't found any good introductory material. The PBS site linked to in goweb's post doesn't offer much elaboration beyond what most of us have read.
We can only explore this realm with mathematical models, so skeptics disregard the whole science just because we can't build atom smashers big enough to study it, and the theorists exploring the possibilities mostly keep to themselves 'cause most of us can't understand much...
Posted by: klurejr
I don't think knowing this is gonna help anyone get laid.......
Posted by: Terminus
One approach (for closed strings) to what you are asking is to parameterize all of the Rieman surfaces and all of their metrics and then form an integral over all on them. This is what modulii spaces are for and the involve things like "Siegel spaces," which are funny infinited dimensional manifolds with Hilber Schmidt norms, Teichmuller spaces (covering spaces of said Riemann surfaces), Kahaler metrics, and diffeomorphism invariance. The idea is that "pertubative string theory" sums over a finite number of Riemann surfaces so if we could integrate over all of them, and over everything else while we are at it, we would have a "non-perturbative" theoryLol, there's more to life than getting laid and eating artery-clogging snacks.