Yesterday, Princeton University, as part of an effort to bring physics to a wide audience during the centennial of Einstein’s great work of 1905, sponsored a performance of Superstrings. This event featured a lecture by Oxford physicist Brian Foster as well as a performance by violinist Jack Liebeck, and it was one in a series of such events that have taken place around the world.
I’ve always wondered what non-physicists come away thinking after being exposed to things like this. There’s not much real scientific content, lots of wonderful music that has no real connection to the physics at issue, and many impressive analogies that could easily confuse listeners as to what the point of the analogy is. This time, one can see some of the effect the event had by reading an article about it in the Daily Princetonian.
The report recounts how the performers explained superstring theory:
“The concept of superstrings can be illustrated with a demonstration of quantum cookery,” Foster said, as Liebeck helped him into an apron. A mesh colander modeled the universe with very fine holes corresponding to fluctuations in the space-time continuum. Foster poured flour through the holes, exemplifying how point-like particles cannot be contained in the universe, making a “delicious mess” on the floor of the stage.
Foster proposed circumventing this problem by making the particles long, rather than point-like, a concept known as particle supersymmetry.
To complete the analogy, Foster introduced uncooked pasta in three different varieties, one for each generation of matter, which he nicknamed “quantum pasta” or “superpasta.” Although composed of the same ground-up grain as the flour, these “particles” avoided the problem of the point-like particles, staying contained within the colander.
Besides convincing at least some of the audience that supersymmetry is the idea of using uncooked spaghetti instead of flour, Foster did admit there was no evidence for any of this: “Superstrings may be purely philosophical and may have no measurable contributions to our universe”. It might have been more helpful if he’d mentioned that “purely philosophical” here really means “wrong”.
Some other facts about physics that the reporter learned yesterday are that:
gravity distorts the smoothness of Einstein’s continuum, a problem he attempted to resolve through quantum mechanics.
There are three “generations” of matter — the quark, lepton and boson.
Superstring theory will resolve the large discrepancies in the masses of these elementary particles.
All in all, it seems to me that these performances are not helping the public understanding of science, but rather signficantly setting it back. I’m sure that those bloggers who are highly concerned about the public understanding of science in general, and string theory in particular, will want to address this issue and demand the immediate cessation of events like this.