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ukelele's daughter just pointed to my string/physics icon and asked, "What's that?". [Edit: Since I've changed physics icons, you'll need to look at the enlarged version below to see what she was asking about.] It strikes me that she may not be the only one who's wondered that. So here's a stab at a broadly understandable explanation. I'll try to keep it fairly short, but I'll stick it behind a cut anyway (since I'll embed a picture or two). Mind you, this won't make any sense to a 3-year-old, but I already took a stab at that in my reply to the original comment.
My icon (seen enlarged here) represents two closed strings (in red) interacting by exchanging a pair of virtual closed strings (in blue). But if you understand that, you probably didn't need an explanation in the first place. So let's start a little simpler.
The basic idea of string theory is that what we see as the various fundamental particles of nature are in fact just different patterns of vibration of tiny "strings". I like to describe them as tiny rubber bands. (Don't ask what the strings are made of: it's not really the right way to think of it, any more than the same question asked about an electron.) So a string with one vibrational pattern would behave like an electron (perhaps orbiting an atom in your retina), while a different vibrational mode would behave like a photon (perhaps carrying light into your eye). Strings can interact by one string pinching apart into two, or by two strings merging together into one. So how does all this relate to a picture like my icon?
On the left, you can see a sequence of snapshots of strings in the process of interacting. You might think of the (mostly) red loops on the left and right as electrons, and the (mostly) blue loop that's sometimes between them as a photon. The pictures tell a story: one of the electron strings pinches off a photon string, which travels across to the other electron string and merges together with it. The picture on the right is just a combined view of all the possible snapshots stacked on top of each other in time order: as shown, each snapshot is just a single slice of the larger picture representing an instant of time. To put that another way, in the picture on the right the string loops are moving through time (represented vertically) and leaving a "contrail" to show where they've been.
My original icon is the same sort of story-picture, but this time the electrons exchange two photons as they travel. You can think of the top edge as the current time slice, with history stretching down into the past.
ukelele's daughter just pointed to my string/physics icon and asked, "What's that?". [Edit: Since I've changed physics icons, you'll need to look at the enlarged version below to see what she was asking about.] It strikes me that she may not be the only one who's wondered that. So here's a stab at a broadly understandable explanation. I'll try to keep it fairly short, but I'll stick it behind a cut anyway (since I'll embed a picture or two). Mind you, this won't make any sense to a 3-year-old, but I already took a stab at that in my reply to the original comment.My icon (seen enlarged here) represents two closed strings (in red) interacting by exchanging a pair of virtual closed strings (in blue). But if you understand that, you probably didn't need an explanation in the first place. So let's start a little simpler.
The basic idea of string theory is that what we see as the various fundamental particles of nature are in fact just different patterns of vibration of tiny "strings". I like to describe them as tiny rubber bands. (Don't ask what the strings are made of: it's not really the right way to think of it, any more than the same question asked about an electron.) So a string with one vibrational pattern would behave like an electron (perhaps orbiting an atom in your retina), while a different vibrational mode would behave like a photon (perhaps carrying light into your eye). Strings can interact by one string pinching apart into two, or by two strings merging together into one. So how does all this relate to a picture like my icon?
On the left, you can see a sequence of snapshots of strings in the process of interacting. You might think of the (mostly) red loops on the left and right as electrons, and the (mostly) blue loop that's sometimes between them as a photon. The pictures tell a story: one of the electron strings pinches off a photon string, which travels across to the other electron string and merges together with it. The picture on the right is just a combined view of all the possible snapshots stacked on top of each other in time order: as shown, each snapshot is just a single slice of the larger picture representing an instant of time. To put that another way, in the picture on the right the string loops are moving through time (represented vertically) and leaving a "contrail" to show where they've been.
My original icon is the same sort of story-picture, but this time the electrons exchange two photons as they travel. You can think of the top edge as the current time slice, with history stretching down into the past.
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--Beth
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Have you ever noticed what strange things come up if you google "pants diagrams" on google images?
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&source=imghp&q=pants+diagrams&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=