Now suppose that approach is all wrong, and that the simplest, smallest object is a string. It's tiny. So tiny its one dimensional. But it’s a string, and it vibrates, much the same as any string on a musical instrument. And the vibrational pattern of a string determines what basic particle (quark, boson, Higgs-boson, Gluon, etc) is created. If you’re religious, you could imagine these strings are all part of god’s harpsichord. It’s a beautiful picture.

With one small problem: One-dimensional objects are Lucifer’s playthings. They do bad things. Casuality (cause-and-effect) doesn’t seem to apply to them and they contradict Relativity’s dictum that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. But we persist, as we have done for in the past (it has been said for light that “Physicists use the wave theory on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and the particle theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.”)

String theory got its start as a way to explain behaviors in particle smashers. Instead of the good, old fashioned 3+1 (time) dimensions that we're all comfortable with, they proposed dimensions past 4, 26 all told, to cover the erratic behaviour of boson particles from certain collisions in particle colliders. For which it worked fairly well, but only covered very specific things (hadron smashers, boson particles). But the world is not solely bosons, so this one really was a one trick pony, needing rethinking for broader applications. And the physicists spoke, and there was a 10 dimensional model and it was good. This became 5 different theories and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Further refined, it became an 11 dimensional version (10 of space, 1 time), also known as M-theory - combining all 5 previous 10 dimensional theories (this the currently favoured model). The ‘M’ variously stands for Mother, Magic, Mystery, Matrix, Murky and Membrane. When they figure out the theory completely, they’ll probably know what the M means.

One theory to bring them all, and in the darkness tie them

Or such is the intent. String theory is an elegant solution. If the standard model is modified to use one dimensional strings instead of points, the number of hand added variables drops from 20 to 1. And that one is the length of strings. It also explains gravity.

Not that it is without it’s own problems. Sheldon Glashow (Nobel Prize winner, Physics, 1979), though he does admit the elegance of the theory, he points at the glaring hole in the middle. “The string theorists have a theory that appears to be consistent and is very beautiful, very complex, and I don’t understand it. It gives a quantum theory of gravity that appears to be consistent but doesn’t make any other predictions. That is to say, there ain’t no experiment that could be done nor is there any observation that could be made that would say, you guys are wrong. The theory is safe, permanently safe. I ask you, is that a theory of physics or a philosophy?”

As it stands, from a mathematical standpoint, string theory is not a theory, it is conjecture. The difference is not simple word play. A conjecture is an idea, proposed as true which has not been proven or disproven. After it has been proven true it becomes a theorem. There is no way to probe and magnify the infinitely small dimensions in which the strings live. And without that, no way to prove or disprove the conjecture. It’s a house of cards, built on sand. But what an elegant house. But the cards-on-sand approach has been taken before – many Doctoral thesis and postdoctoral research papers were written based on the Reimann Hypothesis before it was proven - and if it were ever disproven all of those would have headed for the circular file.

Dr Michio Kaku, cofounder of the string-fields theory says “Thus far, M-Theory has withstood every mathematical challenge. In the past, previous attempts at a theory of everything could be shown to be mathematically inconsistent. M-Theory is the only theory which seems to be mathematically consistent. However, there are many solutions to M-Theory, one of which may be our Universe. No-one has found that one solution yet.” (His books, “Beyond Einstein” and “Hyperspace” are exceptionally well written)

So, whilst it may contain the unified answer to life, the universe and everything, we’re not quite sure of what numbers to plug in to get it. 42 could be a good start. Regardless, I like it. I feel the main fault of superstrings is that they are too far ahead of current mathematics.

When Einstein constructed the theory of Relativity, all of the mathematical tools he required had been developed and proven fifty years earlier. Superstring theory requires more mathematical tools than we currently possess which need to be developed. It is an incredibly promising field of study, which has already produced some profound and intriguing results.

As Huxley said, "The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Even if the bottom falls out of it and it is proven bunkum, it's still an elegant work, which, with many worthwhile offshoots in theoretical physics and mathematics.