Ideas Matter

Jarrell Magana
Professor Weller
English 121
9 March 2015
Ideas Matter
In the Ted Talk video entitled “Is our Universe the only Universe?” by Brian Greene, he talks about the Nobel prizes awarded to a team of astronomers investigating the String Theory and the Inflation Theory (tedtalk.com). Greene also uses a small number of clips to illustrate his point that the universe is not just expanding, but also moving faster through space. Greene is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He has been a professor at the University of Colombia since 1996, and the chairman of the world science festival since 2008. Greene also earned his doctorate at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar graduate in 1987 (briangreene.org). Now according to Greene, he brings up the issue that there could be a possibility of other Universes outside of “our” own one, existing due to the process of string theory.
Greene then talks about that the string theory is a theory that states that any piece of matter when observed beyond molecules, atoms and sub atomic particles, there are tiny filaments of energy that resemble vibrating strings. Hence, it is called “string theory.”   Greene then talks about how these “vibrating strings of energy contain multi-dimensions of space.” With that said, he gives an example that humans are used to a 3 dimensional realm of length, width and depth. However, the whole idea of this theory is that on a really molecular level, there are additional dimensions, all of which there could be billions of these candidate shaped particles. In addition to the shapes of these vibrating strings physicists are having a hard time giving solid evidence of how this mechanism affects the world in which we as humans live. Greene gives numerous examples of these in that, first of all, scientists do not have a specific number to calculate the shapes of these extra dimension. As stated before, the number goes over a billion candidate shapes, thus making it extremely...