The Big and the Small

So, I have picked up a book that I started reading last year. It is a book on cosmology and quantum theory. I know, my geek is showing, but hang with me, this stuff is really incredible. What I love about it is how beautiful these theories are, how elegant and poetic.
I was at the Tonhalle with some friends last week, listening to beautiful music, created by living beings in a building that has contained music and living beings for hundreds of years. As we basked in the reverberations of those thoughts, one of my friends brought up a program she had watched on black holes and cosmology. We commented on the huge impact that these thoughts have on our understanding of ourselves as living conscious beings. A day later I came upon a passage in this book, entitled Parallel Worlds.

"Ever since the Greeks, philosophers have speculated that the ultimate building blocks of matter might be made of tiny particles called atoms. Today with our powerful atom smashers and particle accelerators, we can break apart the atom itself into electrons and nuclei, which in turn can be broken into even smaller subatomic particles. But instead of finding an elegant and simple framework, it was distressing to find that there were hundreds of subatomic particles streaming from our accelerators, with strange names like neutrinos, quarks, mesons, leptons, hadrons, gluons, W-bosons, and so forth. it is hard to believe that nature, at its most fundamental level, could create a confusing jungle of bizarre subatomic particles.

String theory and M-theory are based on the simple and elegant idea that the bewildering variety of subatomic particles making up the universe are similar to the notes that one can play on a violin string, or on a membrane such as a drum head. (These are no ordinary strings and membranes; they exist in ten- and elevendimensional hyperspace.)
Traditionally, physicists viewed electrons as being point particles, which were infinitesimally small. This meant that physicists had to introduce a different point particle for each of the hundreds of subatomic particles they found, which was very confusing. But according to string theory, if we had a supermicroscope that could peer into the heart of an electron, we would see that it was not a point particle at all but a tiny vibrating string. It only appeared to be a point particle because our instruments were too crude.
This tiny string, in turn, vibrates at different frequencies and resonances. If we were to pluck this vibrating string, it would change mode and become another subatomic particle, such as a quark. Pluck it again, and it turns into a neutrino. In this way, we can explain the blizzard of subatomic particles as nothing but different musical notes of the string. We can now replace the hundreds of subatomic particles seen in the laboratory with a single object, the string.In this new vocabulary, the laws of physics, carefully constructed after thousands of years of experimentation, are nothing but the laws of harmony one can write down for strings and membranes. The laws of chemistry are the melodies that one can play on these strings. The universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace."

Such beauty! I am struck by how the glimmers of understanding that I get from this science enhance my appreciation of music, art, nature. It inspires me to write, to create and to value the precious gift that this life and this time is to us.
Today I watched an interview that Stephen Colbert did with Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist. I love what this guy has to say about science and politics and history. Near the end he talks about how to inspire children to learn more about their world, and I think he is right on target. It is a long interview, but well worth the time.

Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson