The Elegant Universe

by Brian Greene

Everything you see in the terrestrial world and the heavens above appears to be made from combinations of electrons, up-quarks, and down-quarks.

That is quarking crazy.

186,000 miles per second, or about 670 million miles per hour.

Light speed. Zoom.

fast enough to circle the earth more than seven times in a second.

Light speed, considered. Still, zoom.

The world grasped the devastating destructive power arising from the conversion of less than 1 percent of two pounds of uranium into energy at Hiroshima;

So much energy in so little matter...

a typical one-hundred-watt bulb emits about a hundred billion billion (1020) photons per second.

Good to know.

It is truly inspiring that beings confined to one planet orbiting a run-of-the-mill star in the far edges of a fairly ordinary galaxy have been able, through thought and experiment, to ascertain and comprehend some of the most mysterious characteristics of the physical universe.

Hairless apes, no less.

These physicists showed that if one modeled elementary particles as little, vibrating, one-dimensional strings, their nuclear interactions could be described exactly by Euler's function.

One dimensional?!??

string theory claims that if the presumed point-particles of the standard model could be examined with a precision significantly beyond our present capacity, each would be seen to be made of a single, tiny, oscillating loop of string.

And the mind blow begins...

length of a typical string loop is about the Planck length, about a hundred billion billion (1020) times smaller than an atomic nucleus.

I'll need my reading glasses for that, for sure.

We would need an accelerator to slam matter together with energies some million billion times more powerful than any previously constructed in order to reveal directly that a string is not a point-particle.

Willikers.

To date there are intriguing hints in theoretical studies that strings may have further substructure,

OMG!