Universe on a T-Shirt: The Quest for the Theory of Everything

A Concise Statement By Prof. Spooky Action at a Distance. Dreams of a Final Theory. The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning.

Hiding in the Mirror. The Physics of Time. Before the Big Bang. Coming of Age in the Milky Way. A history in 40 moments. Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg. The Age of Entanglement. The Island of Knowledge. The Prism and the Pendulum.

Universe on a T-Shirt: The Quest for the Theory of Everything | Dan Falk

A Very Short Introduction. Present at the Creation. Sidelights On Relativity Mobi Classics. Archives of the Universe. How to Build a Time Machine. The Constants of Nature. A Tear at the Edge of Creation. God and the Atom. A Student's Guide to Natural Science. The quest for what scientists call a 'unified theory' is one that lies on the cutting edge of physics.

It's a story that takes us from the ancient Greeks to the Scientific Revolution; from relativity and quantum theory to string theory.

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It's a search that's captivated some of the brightest minds of our time. Yet the search itself is not new. It's evolved over some two-and-a-half millennia, going back to the most ancient and profound questions that human beings have asked about our universe. Science, and especially physics, is all about explaining things. Physicists study small things like atoms and molecules, and big things like stars and galaxies, and quite a lot in between as well. But scientists aren't interested in just any kind of explanation.

They want their theories to explain as much as possible, and yet they try to make the theories themselves as simple as possible. If you carry that idea to its logical extreme, you end up with the idea of a 'Theory of Everything', a single theory that explains the entire universe, or at least a good chunk of it. The 'Theory of Everything' would explain a great deal about the physical world we see around us. It would describe the most basic components that matter is made from, and answer profound questions about the origin and fate of the universe.

The theory, if and when physicists eventually work it out, will probably be expressed through abstract mathematics. The equations might look complicated. But the ideas at the heart of the theory might turn out to be quite simple. They might be so simple, in fact, that the essence of the theory could be written on a T-shirt.

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That might sound like a fantasy, something dreamed up by a group of physicists after having a few too many beers on a Friday afternoon. It's certainly a daring idea, but it's also a very logical one. In fact, it's a natural extension of what every physicist does every day. What they've been doing, in fact, since the beginning of science.

Their methods, and certainly their tools, have evolved over the centuries, but their goal hasn't changed: You might say that the idea goes back to the ancient Greeks.

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Back in the 5th century B. A half-century later, another philosopher, named Democritus, was wondering about the structure of matter, about how it was put together. Democritus asked a very simple question: Suppose you have a lot, and you cut it in half. Then you take one of the halves and cut it in half again.

And suppose you keep on cutting it in half. How long can you keep cutting? In practical terms, of course, after a certain number of cuts your knife isn't going to be sharp enough to go any further.

Universe on A T-Shirt: The Quest for the Theory of Everything

But in theory, how far could you go? Democritus said there must be a limit. Eventually you would get to some fundamental bit of matter that simply couldn't be broken down into anything smaller. He called this fundamental bit of matter the atom. The name is a Greek word that literally means 'un-cuttable' or 'un-dividable'. The idea of the atom was a very powerful one. In fact, it was an idea that was far ahead of its time. It turned out that there really are atoms, though it wasn't until the late 19th century and even the early years of the 20th century that scientists developed the tools needed to probe their structure in detail.

UNIVERSE ON A T-SHIRT: The Quest for the Theory of Everything

By then, of course, the Scientific Revolution had already left its mark on Western civilisation. Great thinkers like Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler challenged the medieval view of the cosmos, and revealed the rational order behind the motions of the sun, moon, and planets.

An Italian mathematician and astronomer took things even further. His name was Galileo. While the ancient Greeks had been asking very broad questions about how the cosmos worked, Galileo saw the wisdom of breaking it up into smaller, bite-sized problems that could be tackled in the laboratory. He experimented with balls rolling down inclined planes, and with a pendulum swinging back and forth. And he was able to work out the rules that those kinds of systems obeyed.

And they weren't just any kind of rules. They turned out to be the kinds of rules that could be expressed very simply through mathematics. Galileo was among the first to recognise the power of mathematics in describing the natural world. Galileo was also the first scientist to use a telescope to study the night sky, and he found the same kind of rational order up there, in the heavens.

Oct 01, Michelle rated it it was amazing Shelves: Very interstesting, fairly easy to follow string theory explanation without going too deep. Also, great quick history of science. Jun 18, B rated it liked it Shelves: Kind of the canned "you don't know anything about physics, so I will tell you the story from the get go" book. Jun 11, Jack Coleman rated it really liked it. Physics sucks the life out of poetry. Feb 23, K added it. Ethan Qiu rated it it was amazing Dec 13, Ken Nickerson rated it really liked it Jun 01, Robert rated it liked it Jul 22, Ernesto rated it really liked it Aug 03, Kristi rated it it was amazing Sep 06, Quincy Balius rated it really liked it Feb 12, Meng-Ru Tsai rated it it was amazing Sep 15, Noam rated it really liked it Oct 19, Yasukothanh rated it really liked it Sep 01, Rani Geha rated it really liked it Sep 09, Caleb Dyck rated it it was amazing Nov 28, Remelique rated it really liked it Aug 30, Eric Schell rated it really liked it Jan 08, Esusands rated it really liked it Dec 23, Schaefer rated it really liked it Mar 06, Melanie rated it it was ok Jul 05, Rahim Jiwani rated it liked it Mar 28, Jbthescienceguy rated it it was amazing Jan 13, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

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I'm a science journalist, author, and broadcaster based in Toronto, Canada. I've written three books so far: My first book, Universe on a T-Shirt, looked at the quest for a unified theory of physics, while In Search of Time explored the physics and philosophy of time. I'm very excited about my new book, The Science of Shakespeare, to be published this April! This time I turn the clock back year I'm a science journalist, author, and broadcaster based in Toronto, Canada. This time I turn the clock back years, investigating the period we now call the Scientific Revolution, and looking at the interplay between science and literature in the age of Shakespeare.

The book is published in the U. Martin's Press and in Canada by Goose Lane.