Good Vibrations

George Ellis

  • The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene
    Vintage, 448 pp, £7.99, February 2000, ISBN 0 09 928992 X

The great ambition of scientists is to grasp the far from obvious nature of the physical world at ever more fundamental levels, and in doing so, to unify our understanding of phenomena that had previously appeared to be disparate. We have been enormously successful in this, demonstrating that complex objects are made from simpler components, and they in turn are made of even simpler ones. Everything around us, ourselves included, is composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and so on – which are composed of negatively charged electrons, and a nucleus of positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons, which are composed of quarks. Thus underlying the immense complexity of life is a simplicity of microscopic composition.

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