Brian Greene on the nature of space and time

For Christmas I gave Julie (and me) tickets to go see Brian Greene speak. He is the author of "The Elegant Universe" , which was the basis for an series on Nova. The local public radio affiliate KUT does a series called the "Spark Engaging speaker series" in which they bring in authors, artists, scientists, etc. It was a great evening. We went to the historic Paramount Theatre, which is right in the middle of downtown Austin at 7th and Congress. A beautiful old building. And it was cool to see it packed completely full of people from all walks of life come see a physicist talk about space, time, and current ideas on string theory.

It was an intesreting and entertaining talk. He is a great speaker. He started with Newton and classical physics, described how the math all works, but he kinda left out the whole "how" question. And then talked about Einstein, and how his ideas showed that gravity warps spacetime. But then he went into quantum meachanics, and showed how the Hesienberg Uncertainty principle leads to a 'noisy' spacetime at the sub-atomic level, and explained that this noise was the basis for the conflict between the macro-scale physics of Einstein and the micro-scale physics of quantum mechanics.

Finally, he described his ideas of string theory, and how if a few things were true, it could tie them both together. They are some pretty big "ifs" though. Like that there have to be 10 dimensions, and the strings vibrate in 10 dimensions. I can't remember the other 2 ifs.

The best part of the evening was the questions and answers at the end. There was a 10 year old boy who asked what the relationship between the weak force and radioactivity was. There were people who asked about dark matter, and people who asked about alternate universes and tears in spacetime and wormholes. All pretty heady stuff. If he comes to your town, I'd reccomend going to see him.