In honor of this biweekly theme I’ve been reading up on string theory, trying to make sense of it all. Finally, after pouring over papers and definitions on scientific websites, then regressing to wikipedia pages, in which every link-text word was just as completely unintelligible, I turned to a better resource: TED talks. You probably know this by now, but here’s the idea: the conference organizers for TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) invite experts to discuss a topic in 18 minutes or under in a manner that is both highly education and highly understandable. Here’s physicist Brian Greene telling you everything you need to know to start to understand string theory:

My only question: Mr. Greene’s talk is from February 2005 and he affirms that experiments within “the next 3 years, 5 years, 10 years” should show whether string theory is true. Granted, we’re still within the 10-year mark from his original talk, but I wonder what the status of the experiments are. Scientists in Italy announced their findings just last year of particles that moved faster than the speed of light. Does string theory account for that? Does it want to? The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland that Greene mentions is currently undergoing routine maintenance and will resume colliding particles in March. Stay tuned, I guess…