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Susskind explains String Theory (M-theory) very well in the lectures available for free on Youtube. He is a world leader on the whole matter (and one of the group that first worked on String theory). Essentially, string theory was inspired by Fynmann diagrams, via considering the 1-D particle "world-lines" in those diagrams as 2-D "areas". The rest of the _very_ complex theory comes logically after. A lot of physicists point towards the "natural" nature of string theory as a favourable aspect of it, in stark contrast to QM which has _always_ been unnatural. The statistical nature of QM - "probabilities and uncertainties", has a "hidden-variable/phenomenon" about it, very much like how the random motion of a particle on the surface of water was seen (by Einstein no less) to actually be brownian motion - in this case water particles hitting the surface particle. QM often screams "I don't know but maybe X is Y and Y is Z with Q% chance", meanwhile string theory says "what if X is Y, and therefore A, B, C, D, ...", which is how classical physics and GR (Einstein) was done. The latter way is seen as a much "stronger" and "insightful" way of physics, and string theory walks more towards that nice line than QM ever did. As a physicist myself, QM has always stank. Everybody knows it. It "works" like HTML/CSS/JS "works". I've always thought that QM has an identity crisis. It tries to stretch itself in two very distinct directions, towards "Quantum Physics" (randomness, uncertainty, strange things like entanglement), and yet relies on vague classical things like "mass". With the Higgs Boson, it relies less on classical things and _indeed_ the Higgs Boson was very sought after (hence the huge celebration for it's discovery) because it pulled QM away from classical physics. But still, QM has a few "smelly" parts. When you see that Schrodinger equation and see that mass variable, doesn't that make you...uncomfortable? Kind of like downloading a "login-form" javascript UI library and using it, and having no idea what it's about or what's going on or how it works. |