The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of by Shing-Tung Yau, Steve Nadis

By Shing-Tung Yau, Steve Nadis

String idea says we are living in a ten-dimensional universe, yet that simply 4 are obtainable to our daily senses. in response to theorists, the lacking six are curled up in strange buildings often called Calabi-Yau manifolds. In The form of internal Space, Shing-Tung Yau, the guy who mathematically proved that those manifolds exist, argues that not just is geometry basic to thread concept, it's also basic to the very nature of our universe.

Time and back, the place Yau has long past, physics has undefined. Now for the 1st time, readers will stick to Yau’s penetrating pondering on the place we’ve been, and the place arithmetic will take us subsequent. a desirable exploration of an international we're merely simply commencing to snatch, The form of internal Space will switch the way in which we think of the universe on either its grandest and smallest scales.

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Additional info for The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

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9 It was a remarkable achievement that might even have surprised Einstein, who hadn’t always recognized that basic physics and mathematics could be so 0465020232-Yau_Layout 1 6/23/10 10:41 AM Page 32 32 THE SHAPE OF INNER SPACE intricately intertwined. He would conclude years later, however, that “the creative principle resides in mathematics. ”10 Einstein’s theory of gravitation was arrived at by such a process of pure thought—realized through mathematics without any prompting from the outside world.

The additional dimension, however, provides enough extra elbow room for both of them to occupy the same matrix and hence be part of the same, more all-encompassing force. I may get in trouble for saying this, but I believe that only a mathematician would have been bold enough to think that higher-dimensional space would afford us special insight into phenomena that we’ve so far only managed to observe in a lower-dimensional setting. I say that because mathematicians deal with extra dimensions all the time.

The trouble arises from the quantum world, where things are always moving or fluctuating: The smaller the scale, the bigger those fluctuations get. The result is that on the tiniest scales, the turbulent, ever-changing picture afforded by quantum mechanics is totally at odds with the smooth geometric picture of spacetime upon which the general theory of relativity rests. Everything in quantum mechanics is based on probabilities, and when general relativity is thrown into the quantum model, calculations often lead to infinite probabilities.

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